Posted on 29 May 2013.
By By Tony Fraser
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (AP) — U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and political leaders from across the Caribbean met in the capital of resource-rich Trinidad & Tobago on Tuesday to sign a trade agreement and discuss a range of security, investment and energy issues.
After a more than three-hour session, Biden signed an agreement providing a framework for trade and investment between the U.S. and the Caribbean Community, a group of 15 nations and territories that include Trinidad, Jamaica and the Bahamas.
At a news conference, Biden said he was aware that island nations face unique challenges and added that the U.S. administration’s goal is “not simply growth, but it’s growth that reaches everybody.”
The leaders also discussed efforts to combat drug trafficking and other transnational crimes under a U.S. program launched in 2009 dubbed the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative. More than $200 million in funding has been committed to it so far.
Biden said Washington and the Caribbean region should be prepared to counter upticks in drug trafficking if smuggling routes swing back heavily to the islands. The Caribbean in the 1980s was the main smuggling route to the U.S. mainland, but the path shifted west to Mexico and Central America.
“We know that as other nations in the hemisphere make strides against drug trafficking, the threat as I said may increasingly shift back toward the Caribbean,” he said.
Biden also disclosed that Washington and Trinidad recently signed a memorandum on launching a renewable energy research center in the country for the whole Caribbean region.
“There’s probably no group of nations better situated to take advantage of renewable energy possibilities than here in the Caribbean,” he said.
Caribbean Community leaders raised the matter of criminals being sent by the U.S. back to their native lands in the region. The matter has been a major issue on the Caribbean’s diplomatic agenda for years.
The U.S. has deported thousands of convicted criminals to the Caribbean annually since 1996, when Congress mandated that every non-citizen sentenced to a year or more in prison be kicked out the U.S. upon release. As it stands now, home countries are told only why an offender is deported due to rules preventing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency from sharing more details without permission first from federal or state entities.
Haitian President Michel Martelly, chairman of the Caribbean Community, said regional leaders “repeated our plea for information sharing with respect to criminal deportees.”
Officials also spoke to Biden about their concerns regarding generous U.S. subsidies to the rum industry in its Caribbean territories that regional distillers worry will drive some island labels out of business or force them to sell out to global beverage corporations.
Trinidad Prime Minister Kalmla Persad-Bissessar said regional governments have been invited to view U.S. Navy vessels that are being decommissioned to see if the craft can be used to patrol the borders of the Caribbean Sea.
Trinidad’s government also disclosed that it has ratified a “status of forces agreement” with Washington spelling out legal protections and obligations of U.S. forces during temporary stays. It says the agreement can’t be the basis for any U.S. base in Trinidad and there are no provisions for other facilities used by American troops on the islands.
Trinidad and Tobago, a two-island nation off Venezuela’s coast, was the second stop on Biden’s three-nation trip in the region. It is the most industrialized country in the Caribbean and one of its most prosperous, thanks to a wealth of natural gas that make it a major fuel supplier for the U.S. and other nations.
Biden arrived Monday night from Colombia, where he met with President Juan Manuel Santos. His next stop will be Brazil, where he will conclude his six-day trip.
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Associated Press writer David McFadden in Kingston, Jamaica, contributed to this report.
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The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
June 17, 2013
We, the Presidents of the United States of America and the Russian Federation, recognize the unprecedented progress in the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), the new capacity they create for the economies and societies of our countries, and the increasing interdependence of the modern world.
We recognize that threats to or in the use of ICTs include political-military and criminal threats, as well as threats of a terrorist nature, and are some of the most serious national and international security challenges we face in the 21st Century. We affirm the importance of cooperation between the United States of America and the Russian Federation for the purpose of enhancing bilateral understanding in this area. We view this cooperation as essential to safeguarding the security of our countries, and to achieving security and reliability in the use of ICTs that are essential to innovation and global interoperability.
Demonstrating our commitment to promoting international peace and security, today we affirm the completion of landmark steps designed to strengthen relations, increase transparency, and build confidence between our two nations:
- To create a mechanism for information sharing in order to better protect critical information systems, we have established a communication channel and information sharing arrangements between our computer emergency response teams;
- To facilitate the exchange of urgent communications that can reduce the risk of misperception, escalation and conflict, we have authorized the use of the direct communications link between our Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers for this purpose;
- Finally, we have directed officials in the White House and the Kremlin to establish a direct communication link between high-level officials to manage potentially dangerous situations arising from events that may carry security threats to or in the use of ICTs.
We have decided to create (in the framework of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission) a bilateral working group on issues of threats to or in the use of ICTs in the context of international security that is to meet on a regular basis to consult on issues of mutual interest and concern. This working group is to assess emerging threats, elaborate, propose and coordinate concrete joint measures to address such threats as well as strengthen confidence. This group should be created within the next month and should immediately start its practical activities.
These steps are necessary in order to meet our national and broader international interests. They are important practical measures which can help to further the advancement of norms of peaceful and just interstate conduct with respect to the use of ICTs. To further deepen our relationship, relevant agencies of our countries plan to continue their regular dialogue and to identify additional areas for mutually-beneficial cooperation in combating threats to or in the use of ICTs.
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Yves here. As China has become more powerful economically, and is building up its navy (a substantial navy is a precondition of being a true superpower), some pundits have taken to anticipating a world where US cedes dominance to China over a protracted and likely unstable transition period, using the decline of the British Empire and the rise of American influence as a guide.
That’s unlikely to be the right frame of reference. As Tom Engelhardt writes in his intro to Pepe Escobar’s piece:
As Escobar explains, to spur the staggering levels of growth that keep the country and the Party afloat, the Chinese leadership is embarking on a kind of forced urbanization program that may have no historical precedent. It is guaranteed to destabilize the countryside, while yet more peasants flood into the cities. It’s seldom acknowledged here (though the Chinese leadership is well aware of it) but China has a unique, almost two-thousand-year-long record of massive peasant uprisings (often religiously tinged) sweeping out of the countryside and upsetting established rule. The last of them was Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution that established the present People’s Republic.Mass protest in China has been on the rise. Environmental conditions are disastrous. Let the Chinese economy falter and who knows what you’ll see. This is not a formula for an expansive imperial power, no less the next master of planet Earth, whatever Washington’s fears and militarized fantasies may be.
Yves again. That does not mean that China won’t be seeking to assert its influence and that the US military industrial complex won’t be disposed to play that up. But instead of seeing a bumpy, fractious transition of leadership, we may instead see a change from a world where an overextended US is still dominant to one of jockeying major countries and power blocs.
By Pepe Escobar, a roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for the Russian network RT and al-Jazeera English. Cross posted from TomDispatch
Sun Tzu, the ancient author of The Art of War, must be throwing a rice wine party in his heavenly tomb in the wake of the shirtsleeves California love-in between President Obama and President Xi Jinping. “Know your enemy” was, it seems, the theme of the meeting. Beijing was very much aware of — and had furiously protested — Washington’s deep plunge into China’s computer networks over the past 15 years via a secretive NSA unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (with the apt acronym TAO). Yet Xi merrily allowed Obama to pontificate on hacking and cyber-theft as if China were alone on such a stage.
Enter — with perfect timing — Edward Snowden, the spy who came in from Hawaii and who has been holed up in Hong Kong since May 20th. And cut to the wickedly straight-faced, no-commentary-needed take on Obama’s hacker army by Xinhua, the Chinese Communist Party’s official press service. With America’s dark-side-of-the-moon surveillance programs like Prism suddenly in the global spotlight, the Chinese, long blistered by Washington’s charges about hacking American corporate and military websites, were polite enough. They didn’t even bother to mention that Prism was just another node in the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020 dream of “full spectrum dominance.”
By revealing the existence of Prism (and other related surveillance programs), Snowden handed Beijing a roast duck banquet of a motive for sticking with cyber-surveillance. Especially after Snowden, a few days later, doubled down by unveiling what Xi, of course, already knew — that the National Security Agency had for years been relentlessly hacking both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese computer networks.
But the ultimate shark fin’s soup on China’s recent banquet card was an editorial in the Communist Party-controlled Global Times. “Snowden,” it acknowledged, “is a ‘card’ that China never expected,” adding that “China is neither adept at nor used to playing it.” Its recommendation: use the recent leaks “as evidence to negotiate with the U.S.” It also offered a warning that “public opinion will turn against China’s central government and the Hong Kong SAR [Special Administrative Region] government if they choose to send [Snowden] back.”
With a set of cyber-campaigns — from cyber-enabled economic theft and espionage to the possibility of future state-sanctioned cyber-attacks — evolving in the shadows, it’s hard to spin the sunny “new type of great power relationship” President Xi suggested for the U.S. and China at the recent summit.
It’s the (State) Economy, Stupid
The unfolding Snowden cyber-saga effectively drowned out the Obama administration’s interest in learning more about Xi’s immensely ambitious plans for reconfiguring the Chinese economy — and how to capture a piece of that future economic pie for American business. Essential to those plans is an astonishing investment of $6.4 trillion by China’s leadership in a drive to “urbanize” the economy yet further by 2020.
That will be the dragon’s share of a reconfigured development model emphasizing heightened productivity, moving the country up the international manufacturing quality ladder and digital pecking order, and encouraging ever more domestic consumption by an ever-expanding middle class. This will be joined to a massive ongoing investment in scientific and technological research. China has adopted the U.S. model of public-private sector academic integration with the aim of producing dual-use technologies and so boosting not only the military but also the civilian economy.
Beijing may, in the end, spend up to 30% of its budget on defense-related research and development. This has certainly been a key vector in the country’s recent breakneck expansion of information technology, microelectronics, telecommunications, nuclear energy, biotechnology, and the aerospace industry. Crucially, none of this has happened thanks to the good graces of the Goddess of the Market.
The pace in China remains frantic — from the building of supercomputers and an explosion of innovation to massive urban development. This would include, for example, the development of the southwestern hinterland city of Chongqin into arguably the biggest urban conglomeration in the world, with an estimated population of more than 33 million and still growing. A typical savory side story in the China boom of recent years would be the way that energy-gobbling country “won” the war in Iraq. The New York Times recently reported that it is now buying nearly 50% of all the oil Iraq produces. (If that doesn’t hit Dick Cheney right in the heart, what will?)
Dreaming of What?
As soon as he was confirmed as general secretary at the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Party Congress in November 2012, Xi Jinping started to weave a “China dream” (zhongguo meng) for public consumption. Think of his new game plan as a Roy Orbison song with Chinese characteristics. It boils down to what Xi has termed “fulfilling the great renaissance of the Chinese race.” And the dreaming isn’t supposed to stop until the 20th Party Congress convenes in 2022, if then.
The $6.4 trillion question is whether any dream competition involving the Chinese and American ruling elites could yield a “win-win” relationship between the planet’s “sole superpower” and the emergingpower in Asia. What’s certain is that to increase the dream’s appeal to distinctly standoffish, if not hostile neighbors, China’s diplomats would have to embark on a blockbuster soft-power charm offensive.
Xi’s two predecessors could not come up with anything better than the vague concept of a “harmonious society” (Hu Jintao) or an abstruse “theory of the Three Represents” (Jiang Zemin), as corruption ran wild among the Chinese elite, the country’s economy began to slow, and environmental conditions went over a cliff.
Xi’s dream comes with a roadmap for what a powerful future China would be like. In the shorthand language of the moment, it goes like this: strong China (economically, politically, diplomatically, scientifically, militarily), civilized China (equity and fairness, rich culture, high morals), harmonious China (among social classes), and finally beautiful China (healthy environment, low pollution).
The Holy Grail of the moment is the “Two 100s” — the achievement of a “moderately prosperous society” by the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th birthday in 2021, one year before Xi’s retirement; and a “rich, strong, democratic, civilized, and harmonious socialist modern country” by 2049, the 100th birthday of the founding of the People’s Republic.
Wang Yiming, senior economist at the National Development and Reform Commission, has asserted that China’s gross domestic product (GDP) will reach 90 trillion yuan ($14.6 trillion) by 2020, when annual per capita GDP will, theoretically at least, hit the psychologically groundbreaking level of $10,000. By 2050, according to him, the country’s GDP could reach 350 trillion yuan ($56.6 trillion), and annual per capita GDP could pass the 260,000 yuan ($42,000) mark.
Built into such projections is a powerful belief in the economic motor that a relentless urbanization drive will provide — the goal being to put 70% of China’s population, or a staggering one billion people, in its cities by 2030.
Chinese academics are already enthusing about Xi’s dreamscape. For Xin Ming from the Central Party School (CPS) — an establishment pillar — what’s being promised is “a sufficient level of democracy, well-developed rule of law, sacrosanct human rights, and the free and full development of every citizen.”
Don’t confuse “democracy,” however, with the Western multiparty system or imagine this having anything to do with political “westernization.” Renmin University political scientist Wang Yiwei typically describes it as “the Sinocization of Marxism… opening up the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Hail the Model Urban Citizen (aka Migrant Worker)
Of course, the real question isn’t how sweet China’s party supporters and rhapsodists can make Xi’s dream sound, but how such plans will fare when facing an increasingly complex and anxiety-producing reality.
Just take a stroll through Hong Kong’s mega-malls like the IFC or Harbour City and you don’t need to be Li Chunling, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to observe that China’s middle class is definitely dreaming about achieving one kind of westernization — living the full consumer life of their (now embattled) American middle-class counterparts.
The real question remains: On a planet at the edge and in a country with plenty of looming problems, how can such a dream possibly be sustainable?
A number of Chinese academics are, in fact, worrying about what an emphasis on building up the country’s urban environment at a breakneck pace might actually mean. Peking University economist Li Yining, a mentor of Premier Li Keqiang, has, for instance, pointed out that when “everyone swarmed like bees” to invest in urban projects, the result was a near bubble-bursting financial crisis. “The biggest risk for China is in the financial sector. If growth comes without efficiency, how can debt be repaid after a boom in credit supply?” he asks.
Chen Xiwen, director of the Party’s Central Rural Work Leading Group, prefers to stress the obvious ills of hardcore urbanization: the possible depletion of energy, resources, and water supplies, the occupation of striking amounts of land that previously produced crops, massive environmental pollution, and overwhelming traffic congestion.
Among the most pressing questions raised by Xi’s dream is what it will take to turn yet more millions of rural workers into urban citizens, which often turns out to mean migrant workers living in shanty towns at the edge of a monster city. In 2011 alone, a staggering 253 million workers left the countryside for the big city. Rural per capita income is three times less than urban disposable income, which is still only an annual 21,800 yuan, or a little over $3,500 (a reminder that “middle class China” is still a somewhat limited reality).
A 2012 report by the National Population and Family Planning Commission revealed that 25.8% of the population is “self-employed,” which is a fancy way of describing the degraded state of migrant workers in a booming informal economy. Three-quarters of them are employed by private or family-owned businesses in an off-the-books fashion. Fewer than 40% of business owners sign labor contracts. In turn, only 51% of all migrant workers sign fixed-term labor contracts, and only 24% have medical insurance.
As working citizens, they should — in theory — have access to local health care. But plenty of local governments deny them because their hukou — household registrations — are from other cities. In this way, slums swell everywhere and urban “citizens” drown in debt and misery. In the meantime, top urban management in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chongqin is working to eliminate such slums in order to clear the way for the wildest kinds of financial speculation and real estate madness. Something, of course, will have to give.
When former World Bank chief economist Justin Lin Yifu warned that China should avoid “over-urbanization,” he nailed it. On the ground, President Xi’s big dream looks suspiciously like a formula for meltdown. If too many migrants flood the big cities and the country fails to upgrade productivity, China will be stuck in the dreaded middle-income trap.
If, however, it succeeds in such a crash way, it can only do so by further devastating the national environment with long-term consequences that are hard to calculate but potentially devastating.
We Don’t Want No Historical Nihilism
Xi, the dreamer, may simply be a master modernist PR tactician hiding an old school outlook. Hong Kong-based political analyst Willy Lam, for instance, is convinced that “ideologically Xi is a Maoist” who wants to maintain “tight control over the party and the military.”
Consider the political landscape. Xi must act as the ideological guide for 80 million Communist Party members. The first thing he did after becoming general secretary was to launch an “inspection tour” of the major southern city of Shenzhen, which in the early 1980s was made China’s initial “special economic zone.” In this, he was emulating China’s first “capitalist roader,” the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping’s landmark 1992 turbo-reform tour of the same area. It was undoubtedly his way of promising to lead the next capitalist surge in the country.
However, a fascinating academic and Internet debate in China now revolves around Xi’s push to restore the authority and legitimacy of the ur-Communist leader Mao Zedong. Otherwise, the president claims, there would be nothing left but “historical nihilism.” As his example of the road not to take, Xi points to the Soviet Union; that is, he is signaling that whatever he will be, it won’t be the Chinese equivalent of the USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, nor by implication will he lose control over China’s military.
Xi is indeed meticulous in his interactions with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), always stressing “the dream of a strong China” and “the dream of a strong military.” At the same time, his attitude perfectly embodies the Communist Party’s grand narrative about its own grandness. Only the Party, they claim, is capable of ensuring that living standards continue to improve and the country’s ever-widening inequality gap is kept in check. Only it can ensure a stable, unified country and a “happy,” “harmonious” society. Only it can guarantee the continuing “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” defend “core interests” (especially what it refers to as “territorial sovereignty”), and ensure China, kicked around by other great powers in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, global respect.
A Sinophile Western cynic would be excused for thinking that this is just a more elaborate way of stressing, as the Chinese do, that the might of the pen (bi gan zi) and the barrel of a gun (qiang gan zi) are the two pillars of the People’s Republic.
All of this was essentially sketched out by senior PLA colonel Liu Mingfu in his recently republished 2010 book, China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era. On one thing Liu and Xi (along with all China’s recent leaders and PLA commanders) agree: China is “back as the most powerful nation where it’s been for a thousand years before the ‘century of humiliation.’” The bottom line: when the problems start, Xi’s dream will feed on nationalism. And nationalism — that ultimate social glue — will be the essential precondition for any reforms to come.
In April, one month after the National People’s Congress, Xi repeated that his dream would be fulfilled by 2050, while the Party’s propaganda chief Liu Yunshan ordered that the dream be written into all school textbooks. But repeating something hardly makes it so.
Xi’s father, former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, was a man who thought outside the box. In many ways, Xi is clearly trying to do the same, already promising to tackle everything from massive corruption (“fighting tigers and flies at the same time”) to government rackets. (Forget lavish banquets; from now on, it’s only supposed to be “four dishes and a soup.”)
But one thing is certain: Xi won’t even make a gesture towards changing the essential model. He’ll basically only tweak it.
Fear and Loathing in the South China Sea
Everyone wants to know how Xi’s dream will translate into foreign policy. Three months ago, talking to journalists from the emerging BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the Chinese president emphasized that “the China Dream also will bring opportunities to the world.”
Enter the charm offensive: in Xi’s new world, “peaceful development” is always in and “the China threat” is always out. In Beijing’s terms, it’s called “all-dimensional diplomacy” and has been reflected in the incessant global travel schedule of Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang in their first months in office.
Still, as with the dream at home, so abroad. Facts on the ground — or more specifically in the waters of the South China Sea — once again threaten to turn Xi’s dream into a future nightmare. Nationalism has unsurprisingly proven a crucial factor and there’s been nothing dreamy about the continuingclash of claims to various energy-rich islands and waters in the region.
Warships have recently been maneuvering as China faces off against, among other countries, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. This unsettling development has played well in Washington as the Obama administration announced a “pivot” to or “rebalancing” in Asia and a new strategy that visibly involves playing China’s neighbors off against the Middle Kingdom in what could only be considered a twenty-first century containment policy.
From Washington’s point of view, there have, however, been more ominous aspects to China’s new moves in the world. In bilateral trade with Japan, Russia, Iran, India, and Brazil, China has been working to bypass the U.S. dollar. Similarly, China and Britain have established a currency swap line, linking the yuan to the pound, and France plans to do the same thing with regard to the euro in an attempt to turn Paris into a major offshore trading hub for the yuan.
Nor was it an accident that Xi’s first trip abroad took him to Moscow. There is no more crucial economic and strategic relationship for the Chinese leadership. As much as Moscow won’t accept NATO’s infinite eastward expansion, Beijing won’t accept the U.S. pivot strategy in the Pacific, and Moscow will back it in that.
I was in Singapore recently when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel dropped in at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asian defense and security forum, to sell the new U.S. focus on creating what would essentially be an anti-Chinese alliance in South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Pacific. Major General Qi Jianguo, deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA, was there as well listening attentively to Hagel, ready to outline a Chinese counter-strategy that would highlight Beijing’s respect for international law, its interest in turbo-charging trade with Southeast Asia, but most of all its unwillingness to yield on any of the escalating territorial disputes in the region. As he said, “The reason China constantly patrols the South China Sea and East Sea is because China considers this to be sovereign territory.”
In this way, the dream and nationalism are proving uncomfortable bedfellows abroad as well as at home. Beijing sees the U.S. pivot as a not-so-veiled declaration of the coming of a new Cold War in the Asia-Pacific region, and a dangerous add-on to the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle concept, a militarized approach to China’s Pacific ambitions as the (presumed) next rising power on the planet.
At the Shangri-La, Hagel did call for “a positive and constructive relationship with China” as an “essential part of America’s rebalance to Asia.” That’s where the new U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — essentially the economic arm of the pivot — would fit in. China’s Ministry of Commerce is reportedly even studying the possibility of being part of it.
There is, however, no way a resurgent Beijing would accept unfettered U.S. economic control across the region, nor is there any guarantee that TPP will become the dominant trading group in the Asia-Pacific. After all, with its economic muscle China is already leading the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that includes all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.
In April, after visiting Beijing, Secretary of State John Kerry began spinning his own “Pacific dream” during a stopover in Tokyo. Yet Beijing will remain wary of Washington’s dreaming, as the Chinese leadership inevitably equates any dream that involves moves everywhere in Asia as synonymous with a desire to maintain perpetual American dominance in the region and so stunt China’s rise.
However nationalism comes into play in the disputed, energy-rich islands of the South China Sea, thenotion that China wants to rule even the Asian world, no less the world, is nonsense. At the same time, the roadmap promoted at the recent Obama-Xi summit remains at best a fragile dream, especially given the American pivot and Edward Snowden’s recent revelations about the way Washington has been hacking Chinese computer systems. Perhaps the question in the region is simply whose dream will vanish first when faced with economic and military realities.
At least theoretically, a strategic adjustment by both sides could ensure that the dream of cooperation, of Chimerica, might prove less them chimerical. That, however, would imply that Washington was capable of acknowledging “core” Chinese national interests — on this Xi’s dream is explicit indeed. Whatever the confusions and difficulties the Chinese leadership faces, Beijing seems to understand the realities behind Washington’s strategic intentions. One wonders whether the reverse applies.
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The Chinese investor behind a $40 billion project to cut a canal through Nicaragua owns a $1.1 billion stake in the telecommunications company that he runs, according to data compiled by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Wang Jing, 40, is the chairman and biggest shareholder of Beijing Xinwei Telecom Technology Co., holding a 37 percent stake as of May 23, according to government filings. State-owned Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings Co. offered to sell a 0.858 percent stake in Xinwei for 158.4 million yuan ($25.8 million), according to a Sept. 28, 2012, notice. That values the entire company at $2.95 billion.
Enlarge image 
Chinese Investor Behind Nicaragua Canal Is Hidden Billionaire
Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, left, stands with Wang Jing, chief executive officer and founder of HKND Group, during the framework agreement for the construction of the Interoceanic Grand Canal in Managua, Nicaragua, on June 14, 2013.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, left, stands with Wang Jing, chief executive officer and founder of HKND Group, during the framework agreement for the construction of the Interoceanic Grand Canal in Managua, Nicaragua, on June 14, 2013. Photographer: Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images
Nicaragua’s Congress earlier this month granted a 50-year concession to Wang’s Hong Kong-basedHKND Group for rights to construct an inter-oceanic canal in the Central American country. Nicaragua’s government estimates the project will cost $40 billion, or more than four times the country’s 2011 gross domestic product.
“Facing unprecedented challenges, we confidently head forward,” Wang said at a June 14 ceremony in Managua with President Daniel Ortega, according to a transcript on Xinwei’s website. “Let us join hands to the great trumpet sound of human self-improvement.”
The closely held company, founded in 1995, makes wireless phone gear. Wang said the company’s goal is to become one of the world’s top three telecommunications companies in five to 10 years, according to the company’s website. Xinwei signed a contract last year worth as much as $300 millionto set up a phone network in Nicaragua.
Wang’s closely held HKND has hired Ronald MacLean-Abaroa, the former mayor of La Paz, Bolivia, and member of the advisory board to Transparency International and a consultant with the World Bank.
GRAPHIC: Bloomberg Visual Data
Bill Wild, HKND’s chief project adviser, said in a June 19 telephone interview that Wang plans to finance the initial part of the project and then seek international investors.
“He has said this will be solely private investment and the plan is aimed at getting international funding,” Wild said. “Shipping companies have indicated to us very clearly that it is a very positive project from their point of view.”
MacLean-Abaroa, in a telephone interview, said Wang’s company would be funding the project itself. He didn’t provide further details. Efforts to contact Wang through MacLean-Abaroa and Xinwei in Beijing were routed to Kekst and Co., a New York-based public relations firm.
While Xinwei is a private company, a coterie of China’s top leaders, including President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang, Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang and top anti-corruption official Wang Qishan havevisited the company, according to its website.
Wang has never appeared on an international wealth ranking. He has business interests in infrastructure, mining, aviation and telecommunications. He controls or serves as board chairman of more than 20 companies in 35 countries around the world, according to HKND’s website.
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Michael Wei in Shanghai at mwei13@bloomberg.net; Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew G. Miller at mmiller144@bloomberg.net
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“We trust China’s word”: Foreign Minister says China’s involvement in Nicaragua Canal protects Costa Rica
More pertinent and the motive for the Chinese building the canal, believes Boissevain, is its strategy to gain control of a massively powerful trade route. Panama Canal is controlled by the Americans and Chinese control of a separate waterway would ensure assets and trade routes are secured.
“The Chinese want to do it so they won’t be in the hands of the Americans. It’s not a commercial decision, to make money, it’s about safeguarding assets and continuous flow of food imports [from South America and west Africa].”
It’s yet another example of the purchasing power of the Chinese seen in frequent examples across the globe.
“The Chinese want to do it so they won’t be in the hands of the Americans. It’s not a commercial decision, to make money, it’s about safeguarding assets and continuous flow of food imports [from South America and west Africa].”
It’s yet another example of the purchasing power of the Chinese seen in frequent examples across the globe.
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ON A recent radio show in the Bahamas, the topic of China’s $8 million loan to the country was being discussed.
