China, Guyana Presidents discuss Belt and Road Initiative

Mar 17, 2021 News

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Kaieteur News – Chinese and Guyanese Presidents, Xi Jinping and Dr. Irfaan Ali, held talks yesterday on the promotion of a series of initiatives, including the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s controversial debt-laden plan to build a trade superhighway across the globe. This is according to Xinhua News Agency, the official state-run press agency of the People’s Republic of China.
According to Xinhua, Xi said that China and Guyana should take the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic ties next year as an opportunity to push for more cooperation results and lift bilateral relations to higher levels. He reportedly added that China expects a positive role of Guyana in promoting cooperation between China and Caribbean countries as a whole, as well as in developing the relationship between China and the Caribbean Community.
The Office of the President reported that the President led a high-level ministerial team in the discussions, that included Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Senior Minister within the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Hugh Todd, and the Minister of Public Works, Juan Edghill.
BRI was unveiled in 2013 by President Xi and since then has been relatively successful around the world with some of China’s partners. Its official outline states that BRI is meant to “promote the connectivity of Asian, European and African continents and their adjacent seas, establish and strengthen partnerships among the countries along the Belt and Road, set up all-dimensional, multi-tiered and composite connectivity networks, and realize diversified, independent, balanced and sustainable development in these countries.”
Guyana signed on to an instrument signaling its intent to participate, in July 2018. Then Granger administration, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Greenidge, who is now Government Advisor on Borders, had signed onto a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Chinese Ambassador to Guyana, Cui Jianchun, noting that Guyana would cooperation within the Framework of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative.
Under the initiative, scores of countries appear to benefit from multimillion-dollar soft loans from China for the construction of roads, bridges, airports, deep water ports and other infrastructure.
Because the project has potential to impact the global political and economic reality significantly, it has become controversial, and has been dubbed by the West as a manifestation of China’s debt-trap diplomacy.
Kaieteur News has highlighted how China has been targeting weak and/or corrupt governments to sign onto its initiative, signing away exorbitant loans for mega-infrastructural projects. Nothing is free. But sometimes, the price to be paid is more than what was bargained. Several countries that signed onto China’s Belt and Road initiative are finding this out the hard way.
In 2018 alone, China acquired over 20 deep water harbours and airports from several countries around the world. The country was able to do so by lending those countries massive amounts of money they would be unable to repay within the stipulated period. The country is accused of leveraging these massive loans it holds over small states worldwide to snatch assets and increase its military footprint. Developing countries from Pakistan to Djibouti, the Maldives to Fiji, all owe huge amounts to China. Already there are examples of defaulters being pressured into surrendering control of assets or allowing military bases on their land.

Issues with the Belt and Road – A Summary
Here are some of the countries, which have been shackled to China’s will, through the Belt and Road Initiative:

SRI LANKA
China has shored up its presence in the Indian Ocean, investing billions of dollars to build port facilities and plan maritime trade routes to help increase its market reach.
Struggling to pay its debt to Chinese firms, Sri Lanka formally handed over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease, in 2019, in a deal that government critics have said threatens the country’s sovereignty. The state-controlled China Merchants Port Holdings Company signed a deal with the Sri Lanka Ports Authority to control a 70 percent stake in the Hambantota port, which lies on the southern coast of the country.
Sri Lankan politicians said the Hambantota deal, valued at US$1.1 billion, was necessary to chip away at the debt, but analysts warned of the consequences of signing away too much control to China.
“The price being paid for reducing the China debt could prove more costly than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,” said N. Sathiya Moorthy, a senior fellow specializing in Sri Lanka at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation.
Sri Lanka has long been in India’s orbit, but its relationship with China has strengthened in recent years. As Western nations accused Mahinda Rajapaksa, the country’s former president, of grievous human rights abuses during the final stages of Sri Lanka’s nearly 26-year civil war, China had extended billions of dollars of loans to Mr. Rajapaksa’s government for new infrastructure projects.

CAMBODIA
The final nail in the proverbial coffin’ is what China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents for one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia—Cambodia. China has long held a presence in Cambodia. However, the Chinese have become unwanted guests in recent years. The more help Cambodia gets from China, the greater the influx of Chinese. And, along with them, came their rules and way of life.
But, being a country suffering from basic power and sanitation issues, Cambodia welcomed the hefty cheques, soft loans and infrastructural plans from China with open arms. Between 2013 and 2017, China “invested” US$5.3B in the country. While these and other initiatives were said to be geared to better the lives of Cambodians, the reality could not have been further away from this dream.
Even before the Belt and Road Initiative, China secured a foothold in Cambodia that allowed it to exude influence over the country. However, international onlookers have said that Cambodia sealed its fate as being fully dependent on China, when it signed the Belt and Road Initiative.
For Cambodia, the Belt and Road Initiative serves as a continuation of what began many years ago. In fact, some of the projects that existed before are now linked to the Belt and Road Initiative.China is at work building a deep water port, airport and virtual city on 45,000 hectares of Cambodian land. The work is being done under the supervision of solely Chinese contractors. The projects brought no jobs for locals.
While the work started before Road and Belt Initiative, the projects now have direct links to the initiative.
Back in 2008, China’s Tianjin Union Development Group (UDG) was granted a 99-year lease to around 20% of the country’s total coastline at the modest price of US$30 per hectare.
Cambodia’s Constructors Association has estimated the so-called “Pilot Zone” project’s total cost at US$3.8 billion. The amount of land leased is more than three times the legal limit under Cambodian land law, which caps land concessions at 10,000 hectares.
The concession also includes land that was previously protected from development within the Botum Sakor National Park, but was made available for private purchase by a royal decree. In 2019, Asia Times reported that Cambodian villagers and environmental activists were in frequent disputes with the Chinese company, claiming UDG has made use of Cambodian military police to enforce its claim.
Some locals say they have been violently forced off their land by security forces, with homes dismantled and burned to the ground, according to a report by Licadho, a local human rights group.

ZAMBIA
An international airport, a state-owned electricity company, a National Broadcasting Network and a major roadway in Zambia, have all been taken over by China.
In fact, the takeover of the South African country has become so pronounced that some observers are asking the question, “Is Zambia the first African country to become a full Chinese colony?”
Zambia’s reported ‘colonization’ is due to its government’s failure to repay a US$8B debt to China for infrastructural projects undertaken by the Chinese under programmes like the “Belt and Road” initiative.
Given the appalling proportions of the debt, it was no surprise that Zambia’s plight was recently highlighted on “The Dr. Mumbi show” —a widely viewed online/TV programme in Africa.
During her show, Dr. Mumbi Seraki, noted that China has been given unrestrained control over Zambian resources owing to over-borrowing and the unfiltered immigration of Chinese into the country. It was also highlighted that the Chinese have taken over African neighbourhoods, marketplaces, and major business sectors such as mining and real estate.
Dr. Mumbi noted that the situation is causing conflict between the Chinese immigrants and the locals. But there is nothing that could be done by the Government of Zambia. Their hands are tied.
“If the Zambians complain about something which is done illegally, the Chinese government steps in and says don’t touch my people and the Zambian Government backs down.”
As if that is not enough, Dr. Mumbi said that China has also been grabbing up major State assets.
In 2019, the state-owned TV and radio news channel, ZNBC, and the Lusaka International Airport were taken over by China. Even the State’s electricity company, ZESCO, is poised for takeover by the Chinese government owning their loan default, Mumbi stressed. But the government has been denying the reports.
“They (the Government) have been trying to play cool like everything is ok but they have actually been in secret talks over how their national electricity company will be taken over by China,” the African talk-show host revealed.
In addition to all this, the Chinese have closed off a road on the central point of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.

ECUADOR
A giant dam called Coca Coda Sinclair in the Ecuadorian jungle, financed and built by China, was supposed to christen Ecuador’s vast ambitions, solve its energy needs and help lift the small South American country out of poverty.Instead, it has become part of a national scandal, engulfing the country in corruption, perilous amounts of debt — and a future tethered to China.
Nearly every top Ecuadorean official involved in the dam’s construction is either imprisoned or sentenced on bribery charges. That includes a former vice president, a former electricity minister and even the former anti-corruption official monitoring the project, who was caught on tape talking about Chinese bribes.
The construction of the dam has been criticized as shabby, as thousands of cracks are splintering the dam’s machinery, though it has only been opened for a few years. Its reservoir is clogged with silt, sand and trees. And the only time engineers tried to throttle up the facility completely, it shook violently and shorted out the national electricity grid.
Then there is the price tag: around $19 billion in Chinese loans, not only for this dam, known as Coca Coda Sinclair, but also for bridges, highways, irrigation, schools, health clinics and a half dozen other dams the government is scrambling to pay for.
It doesn’t matter whether Ecuador can afford them. China gets paid either way. To settle the bill, China gets to keep 80 percent of Ecuador’s most valuable export — oil — because many of the contracts are repaid in petroleum, not dollars. China gets the oil at a discount, then sells it for an additional profit.
Pumping enough oil to repay China has become such an imperative for Ecuador that it is drilling deeper in the Amazon, threatening more deforestation.

 

 

 

 

 

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