PPP/C risks being viewed as beholden to the Republican Party in the eyes of the Biden administration

Nov 23, 2021 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – Another wave of anti-China vitriol is sweeping across Guyana and sections of the print and electronic media are hard at work pushing the anti-China propaganda.

But let me make it clear from the outset, my letter is not in defence of the Chinese, it’s more about what I believe is good for my country. Development has many trap doors. There is no perfect developmental pathway just as there is no perfect government to lead the way.
The China critics have taken aim at key developmental projects including the new bridge across the Demerara River, the Amaila Falls Hydropower project, two major highways and a number of community and hinterland roads. The campaign is aimed ostensibly at preventing China from winning the contracts. The vitriol has become so exasperating that one commentator claimed that, “Guyana is being recolonised by the Chinese and that the Chinese control just about everything” and have managed to infiltrate every village across the country.

This must put to shame the historians of the Booker Group of Companies whose stranglehold of British Guiana in those days was described as Bookers Guiana. And as though the chant that ‘Chinese are in control of everything’, in Guyana, it was not scary enough, here comes the absurdity of the century. Describing the nature of the Chinese presence in Guyana we are told; “We are getting a different form of colonialism and it’s probably more ruthless and without conscience.”

Our African brothers in the former Belgian Congo and Portuguese colonies would be dumbstruck on hearing this. First, it was the Brazilians who were ‘taking over’ then it was the Chinese, currently it is ExxonMobil and the Trinidadians but now we have circled back to the Chinese, this time in a most ‘unGuyanese’ manner bordering on an extreme nationalist, if not xenophobic pronouncements.

But the narrative doesn’t end here. We are told that the Chinese Embassy in Guyana is engaged in tax evasion and in illegal container smuggling. One is left to wonder whether in the midst of all these ‘irregularities’, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the GRA have fallen asleep at the wheels.

If, as is suggested, the Chinese are engaged in these irregular activities then we must be evenhanded. Who says those in the private sector who cry foul are not equally involved?
As the maxim goes, ‘People in glass houses should not throw stones.’
In any event, it was good to see the rejection of the allegation by the Chinese Embassy in Georgetown. After 55 years of independence and knowing what the economic and social conditions were in this country during the pre and early post independence periods, any level-headed and forward-looking Guyanese would easily recognise from a distance, movement in a progressive direction.

Guyanese would welcome any public/private investment or foreign funded project either by way of grant aid or soft loan designed to bring relief in the form of social or physical infrastructure, provided that transparency and accountability are the hallmarks of the funds received and the project being implemented. The Chinese are quite competent and effective in responding to hostile propaganda and in explaining their social political and economic domestic policies especially where foreign policy is concerned. We only have to cast our minds back to the meeting held at Alaska in March this year where top US and Chinese diplomats clashed.

Here in Guyana, the Chinese Embassy was just as effective in their rebuttal to Secretary of State Pompeo who, during a visit to Guyana lambasted the Chinese communist Party warning against Chinese investments and the political costs. Pompeo is now history and so is the administration, which he once served, that is why it could prove harmful to Guyana if it does not make a strategic and tactical shift in its relations with Biden administration.

The PPP/C risks being viewed as beholden to the Republican Party in the eyes of the Biden administration notwithstanding the battles it fought valiantly at GECOM and in the courts to win government. But that is a matter for the diplomats at Foreign Affairs to sort out. In the meanwhile, apart from being close to achieving global equivalence to the US, China has surpassed Japan to become the second largest contributor to the system of development banks that provide some US$200 billion in subsidised loans to poor countries each year.

China is now the fifth largest overall donor across the range of UN agencies and it is the 6th largest donor to the International Development Association, the World Bank’s low income lending arm. China’s decidedly different economic and political system and strategic interests of its own does not mean nuclear conflict with the US.
So while we in Guyana fret and fuss over Chinese investments in Guyana, let us take note of the recent meeting of ‘old friends’ during the Biden-Xi talks and situate ourselves in the context of the bigger picture.

Yours faithfully,
Clement James Rohee

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