Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is clearly itching to sign New Zealand up to China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”. Ardern witters that the notorious scheme “has really evolved”, while Trade Minister David Parker urges New Zealand to “get on board”.
All those billions of glittering yuan from Beijing are apparently blinding the “Queen of Kindness” to the horrific reality of genocide in Xinjiang. Not to mention the existential threat to New Zealand’s sovereignty.
Because the hard truth is that, for all China’s pomposity about sovereignty and “imperialism”, the BRI is plain old imperialism wrapped in a velvet glove. Africa’s tinpot panjandrums are selling their countries out to a colonial master more brutal than any 19th-century European power.
Beijing long has had an eye on the resource-rich but impoverished countries that dot the Atlantic coast[…]They call it “debt-trap diplomacy”.
Easy credit extended on favourable terms when either no other country will, or global agencies such as the International Monetary Fund insist upon harsh reform measures such as stamping out graft and corruption.
There comes a time, however, when the debts are called in. And it isn’t always in the conventional sense of repaying the cash.
The payback can come in the form of foreign policy demands: witness, for example, the Philippines’ president faithfully following at Xi Jinping’s heels. Pakistan has virtually handed over its power infrastructure to China. China built a new port for Sri Lanka – and quickly seized it when the Sri Lankan government couldn’t pay its debt, giving China a handy port on the doorstep of its arch-rival, India.
“BRI” and “corruption” go hand-in-hand: most BRI signatories are in the top 50% for corruption. Ten are among the most corrupt in the world. China has lavished billions on kleptocracies like Kazakhstan.
China isn’t the first nation to employ this as an imperial strategy. But when it comes to Africa, it has turned the tactic into an art form.
Beijing is far and away the biggest lender to Africa[…]when it comes to the Republic of Congo, China has supplied 80 per cent of the nation’s borrowings, worth around 25 per cent of Congo’s GDP. Neighbouring Cameroon is in a similar situation.
Direct loans aren’t the only means of providing cash. One of the more controversial practices is for a handout to be secured against a long-term mining project where Chinese-government-owned firms take all the profit.
In 2017, Guinea negotiated a $20 billion barter deal with China where Beijing promised to provide infrastructure, road networks, sanitation and a university building.
The trade-off was that a group of Chinese-government-connected companies – China Henan International, Chalco and China Power and Investment – obtained mining licences and agreements over two massive bauxite deposits, the raw material for aluminium.
Guinea also happens to be the home of one of the richest iron ore deposits in the world.
ABC Australia
The Chinese Communist Party knows that its regime is living on borrowed time. Barring dramatic changes, its population will halve by the end of the century. For the next 50 years, it will be burdened by a tsunami of geriatrics that no one wants to look after. Demography is destiny; and China’s destiny is bleak.
The Xi regime is racing against the demographic clock to try and buy and bully its way to superpower status.
Gullible, greedy and incompetent politicians in debt-laden, resource-rich countries are the key to its strategy. Enter Jacinda Ardern.
The combination of Ardern’s utter managerial incompetence and the fallout of her panicked pandemic policies will hamstring New Zealand’s economy for years to come. Billions of apparently easy money from a Communist state is exactly what will pull Ardern into Xi’s orbit.
And a New Zealand signed up to the BRI will be just another puppet state of Beijing.
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