Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Australia’s munster for International Development and the Pacific, this week exposed President Xi’s Dynasty in China of conning loans to poor Pacific nations on unfavorable terms and constructing “useless buildings” and “roads to nowhere” in the region.
What would uneducated fat big welfare puppets across the Pacific know? They are more than happy to take money from anyone, especially smiling Chinese bearing gifts.
China’s imperialist ‘One Road One Belt’ campaign involves building global influence and control over vulnerable developing countries including across the Pacific.
China wants ‘new Silk Road’ One Belt One Road project to help it dominate world trade. The masterplan is to build a vast network of new trade routes across the globe, multiple high-speed rail networks to penetrate Europe, massive ports across Asia and Africa and a series of free-trade zones.
Closer to home, it will cement Chinese influence in the Pacific in countries like East Timor, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
China is going to spend up to a trillion dollars on infrastructure projects and hopes to bind more than 65 countries and two-thirds of the world’s population to its economy.
Economists have likened the project to a modern-day Marshall Plan. It is an attempt by the Chinese to secure global dominance at a time when the United States is stepping back, and on the domestic front to keep growth and wealth strong for decades to come.
China’s aim is to lift trade by $2.5 trillion in a decade by flooding world markets with cheap, high-quality Chinese goods. It is empire-building on a scale the world has not seen before.
Professor Wang Yiwei from the China and Globalisation think tank said: “China is the biggest rising power and we welcome other countries along with us to achieve our great rejuvenation, our China dream.”
One Belt and One Trap
So Beijing is currying favour (so solly, ‘szechuaning favour‘) with the region’s smaller nations by funnelling yuan into little-used infrastructure projects. The Pacific full of these useless buildings which nobody maintains, which are basically white elephants.
Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific, said on Wednesday. “We just don’t want to build a road that doesn’t go anywhere. We want to ensure that the infrastructure that you do build is actually productive and is actually going to give some economic benefit or some sort of health benefit.”
Concerns over Chinese political meddling have been raised by Australian prime munster Malcolm Turncoat, who noted “disturbing reports about Chinese influence” in domestic politics.
Canberra last month rightly proposed new laws to tackle growing Chinese espionage threats and interference in Australian domestic politics, after Labor’s Shanghai Sam saga. Sam Dastyari, an opposition Labor senator received Chinese cash bribes of $50,000 and then called for Australia to respect Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea — a position contrary to that of his party.
Canberra’s new laws prompted by Sam’s yuan greed, seek to curtail chinese influence over MPs and fears of spying — would ban foreign political donations and force lobbyists to reveal when they are working for overseas entities.
Ms Fierravanti-Wells has also accused the Xi Dynasty in Beijing of providing loans to smaller Pacific countries on unfavourable terms.
“We encourage China to utilise its development assistance in a productive and effective manner. In other words, we just don’t want to build something for the heck of building it,” she said.
China is one of our strongest development partners, and this direct investment is an example of the huge confidence that China and Chinese companies have in Papua New Guinea China transferred $1.8bn in aid and loans to South Pacific nations between 2006 and 2016, according to research by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank. Papua New Guinea, which has seen its relations with Australia strained over the problem of asylum seeker camps on Manus Island, is one of the region’s countries that has been drawn into the Chinese sphere of influence.
In November, corrupt prime minister of Papua New Guinea, Peter O’Neill, signed a series of Chinese influence infrastructure deals as part of the Xi Dynasty’s ‘Belt and Road’ imperial initiative.
Fears of Chinese spying have also prompted Canberra to consider axing a deal under which China’s Huawei was to run a seabed cable 4,000km from Sydney to the Solomon Islands, instead proposing to bankroll the A$100m ($78m) project itself.
China’s Joseph Goebbels, Ku Lang:
“Confucius say, war not determine who right. War determine who left.”