Australia, the US, India and Japan are talking about establishing a joint regional infrastructure scheme as an alternative to China’s multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative in an attempt to counter Beijing’s spreading influence, the Australian Financial Review reported yesterday, citing a senior US official.
The unnamed official was quoted as saying that the plan involving the four was still “nascent” and “won’t be ripe enough to be announced’ during Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s visit to the US later this week.
However, the project was on the agenda for Turnbull’s talks with US President Donald Trump during that trip and was being seriously discussed, the official said.
Photo: AFP
The source added that the preferred terminology was to call the plan an “alternative” to the Belt and Road Initiative, rather than a “rival.”
“No one is saying China should not build infrastructure,” the official was quoted as saying. “China might build a port which, on its own, is not economically viable. We could make it economically viable by building a road or rail line linking that port.”
While Trump withdrew the US last year from a massive regional trade pact that included Australia and Japan, the National Security Strategy paper that he released in December last year called for policies to answer Chinese and Russian infrastructure-building efforts.
Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop told Sky News in an interview that senior officials from the four nations have discussed “a range of opportunities and challenges,” Bloomberg reported yesterday.
“There is an enormous need for infrastructure, particularly in our region,” she said.
Bishop played down any rivalry with China, telling Sky News that any new “infrastructure initiative need not be at the expense of any other initiative.”
Japan plans to use its official development assistance (ODA) to promote a broader “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy,” including “high-quality infrastructure,” according to a summary draft of last year’s white paper on ODA.
“Between the four countries, we are exchanging opinions about mutual interests on various occasions, including the Japan-US and the Japan-US-India, Japan-Australia-India trilateral frameworks,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters yesterday in Tokyo.
“I would like to refrain from discussing details of specific discussion topics. Anyway, it’s not the case that this is in opposition to China’s One Belt, One Road plan,” he said.
The Indo-Pacific strategy has been endorsed by Washington and is also seen as a counter to the Belt and Road Initiative.
First mentioned during a speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to university students in Kazakhstan in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative is a vehicle for the Asian country to take a greater role on the international stage by funding and building global transport and trade links in more than 60 countries.
Xi has heavily promoted the initiative, inviting world leaders to Beijing in May last year for an inaugural summit at which he pledged US$124 billion in funding for the plan, and enshrining it into the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution in October last year.
Beijing last month outlined its ambitions to extend the initiative to the Arctic by developing shipping lanes opened up by global warming, forming a “Polar Silk Road.”
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS