Yet again, the Chinese Communist Party is weaponising the moronic greed of a South Pacific panjandrum ruling a running-down island state desperate for cash. No, I’m not talking about Jacinda Ardern inching ever-closer to the poisoned carrot that is Xi Xinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative”.
Papua New Guinea is swallowing the carrot whole. Now China is showing the whip hand – and unleashing a new, blatant threat against not just Australia but the whole South Pacific.
A Chinese company says it wants to build a new $39bn city with a major seaport, industrial area and free-trade zone on Papua New Guinea’s south coast, just kilometres from Australian territory.
The “New Daru City” proposal will escalate concerns within Australian security agencies over China’s interest in PNG’s impoverished Western Province, where another Chinese company plans to build a $200m fisheries industrial park.
This would not just be a strategic threat to Australia – especially after the frankly mind-boggling 2015 decision to sign away the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company – but the entire South Pacific. It would also be an environmental and economic disaster, allowing Chinese fleets to spread their pillage of the oceans unchallenged.
Hong Kong-registered WYW Holding, a developer of Myanmar’s New Yangon City, has asked PNG Prime Minister James Marape to approve the development under a “Build Operate Transfer” arrangement, where PNG would receive the assets after an unspecified period of Chinese ownership and management[…]
Mr Mo said the proposed city would span 100sq km and include fisheries and agricultural processing facilities, and provision for “intensive manufacturing”[…]
In other words, another polluted Chinese wasteland spewing smog and filth into the Torres Strait.
As The BFD has reported, China has already used BRI funded projects such as New Yangon City to seize a strategic stronghold in the Indian ocean and a base to strike at India. The proposed New Guinea development would similarly stitch up the South Pacific.
Bluntly, China is trying to divide and conquer two of the members of the “Quad” informal alliance. Japan should keep a sharp eye on the Senkaku Islands.
As usual, China is proceeding by a combination of divide-and-conquer and playing the greed of puffed-up local politicians. This is the strategy China used in beguiling socialist cockerel Daniel Andrews to sign up to the BRI in clear defiance of the federal government and security agencies. In Papua, the communists have waved a wad of cash at a greedy local politician before bedazzling the prime minister with an apparent fait accompli bigger than the national GDP.
Daru, which has a population of just 20,000 people and is the centre of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic, is about 200km from the Australian mainland but within kilometres of Australian islands in the Torres Strait.
The proposed value of the development would exceed PNG’s annual GDP by about $US5bn[…]
While The Australian understands the letters were received by Mr Marape’s office, his spokesman said the Prime Minister was “unaware of such projects”[…]
Western Province Governor Toboi Awi Yoto is a strong backer of Chinese investment in his region, and a recent critic of Australia.
So, if Australia won’t “gibsmedat” to a grasping Pacific mendicant, China will.
A vast Chinese owned-and-run city on Australia’s doorstep is a provocation akin to the Soviets stationing missiles in Cuba in 1962. Whether China is seriously going to build a massive [fortress] city in PNG or whether they are just literally and metaphorically fishing, the threat to the Asia-Pacific region from aggressive Chinese expansion is now undeniable.
The Lowy Institute’s Pacific program director, Jonathan Pryke, said such “absurd” projects were emerging across the region.
“It seems the strategy is to try and get a politician of some level to sign off, generate enough attention around it that Beijing notices, and hopefully something will come out of it that gets the money flowing[…]But frankly they are too good to be true.”
The Australian
Somebody needs to get this message across to the dangerously naive Ardern government. Use crayons and lots of colourful pictures if you have to.
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