Leaders from more than 50 African nations gathered in Beijing on Monday to attend the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, where Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) delivered a speech pledging US$60 billion of financial support for the continent, matching his pledge from three years ago.
Despite the eye-watering levels of investment, there is mounting evidence that China’s heavy presence in Africa is nothing short of a neocolonial resource grab that uses “debt-trap” diplomacy to saddle African nations with unsustainable levels of debt.
Beijing’s increasing assertiveness around the world is sounding alarm bells in Washington, but it also affords Taiwan an opportunity to boost its diplomatic credentials as a key ally to counter China’s threat.
In the Asia-Pacific region, China’s militarization of waters in the South and East China Seas through aggressive island-building is well-documented. On Monday, Japanese Minister of Defense Itsunori Onodera said that China has been “unilaterally escalating” military activities over the past year, including conducting airborne operations around Japanese airspace and sending a nuclear submarine near disputed islands.
“This has become a significant concern for our country’s defense,” Onodera said.
The umbrella of Beijing’s nefarious influence spreads much wider than just the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese Communist Party is steadily painting the globe red as it leverages its economic might to force indebted nations in Africa and elsewhere to cede strategic ports and hand over valuable mineral wealth and resources to pay off Chinese loans.
Sri Lanka is perhaps the most egregious example of the grave security threat posed by China’s “debt-trap” diplomacy, delivered through its Belt and Road Initiative. In December last year, the Sri Lankan government was forced to hand over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease in a desperate attempt to pay off US$8 billion of debt the nation had racked up to Chinese state-controlled firms.
Perhaps the irony was lost on China’s leaders, given that Hong Kong’s New Territories were leased to Britain from China during the Qing Dynasty in 1898 for, you guessed it, 99 years — an aspect of the UK’s colonial past about which China never fails to remind Britain.
China last year opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti, whose government is reportedly close to striking a deal with a Chinese state-controlled company that would cede control of its main port, which is the main access point for US, French, Italian and Japanese military bases in the area.
Earlier this year, French magazine Le Monde reported that China had infiltrated the African Union’s computer network and had been siphoning confidential data to a server in Shanghai every evening for five years from 2012 to last year. The union’s building was funded almost entirely by China as a “gift” to Africa and constructed by Chinese firms, with everything down to the furniture and interior fittings supplied by China. It was the mother of all Trojan horses.
However, perhaps of even more concern for Washington is that China has even begun to reach into South America, which the US regards as its backyard. The latest example of this occurred last month, when Beijing poached Taiwan’s former diplomatic ally El Salvador, eliciting an uncharacteristically robust response from the US Department of State.
Washington is clearly rattled by China’s neocolonial designs, but out of every crisis comes an opportunity, and Taipei should be doing everything in its power to leverage heightened concern over Chinese expansionism to supercharge its relationships with the US, Japan and other like-minded nations.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
The past few months have seen tremendous strides in India’s journey to develop a vibrant semiconductor and electronics ecosystem. The nation’s established prowess in information technology (IT) has earned it much-needed revenue and prestige across the globe. Now, through the convergence of engineering talent, supportive government policies, an expanding market and technologically adaptive entrepreneurship, India is striving to become part of global electronics and semiconductor supply chains. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India” has been the guiding force behind the government’s incentive schemes that span skilling, design, fabrication, assembly, testing and packaging, and