China’s Creditor Imperialism

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Chinese Garment Factory in Senegal | Image: Fibre2Fashion

Just as European imperial powers employed gunboat diplomacy, China is using sovereign debt to bend other states to its will. As Sri Lanka's handover of the strategic Hambantota port shows, states caught in debt bondage to the new imperial giant risk losing both natural assets and their very sovereignty.

BERLIN – This month, Sri Lanka, unable to pay the onerous debt to China it has accumulated, formally handed over its strategically located Hambantota port to the UAsian giant. It was a major acquisition for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – which President Xi Jinping calls the “project of the century” – and proof of just how effective China’s debt-trap diplomacy can be.

Unlike International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending, Chinese loans are collateralized by strategically important natural assets with high long-term value (even if they lack short-term commercial viability). Hambantota, for example, straddles Indian Ocean trade routes linking Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to Asia. In exchange for financing and building the infrastructure that poorer countries need, China demands favorable access to their natural assets, from mineral resources to ports.

Moreover, as Sri Lanka’s experience starkly illustrates, Chinese financing can shackle its “partner” countries. Rather than offering grants or concessionary loans, China provides huge project-related loans at market-based rates, without transparency, much less environmental- or social-impact assessments. As US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson put it recently, with the BRI, China is aiming to define “its own rules and norms.”

To strengthen its position further, China has encouraged its companies to bid for outright purchase of strategic ports, where possible. The Mediterranean port of Piraeus, which a Chinese firm acquired for $436 million from cash-strapped Greece last year, will serve as the BRI’s “dragon head” in Europe.

By wielding its financial clout in this manner, China seeks to kill two birds with one stone. First, it wants to address overcapacity at home by boosting exports. And, second, it hopes to advance its strategic interests, including expanding its diplomatic influence, securing natural resources, promoting the international use of its currency, and gaining a relative advantage over other powers.

China’s predatory approach – and its gloating over securing Hambantota – is ironic, to say the least. In its relationships with smaller countries like Sri Lanka, China is replicating the practices used against it in the European-colonial period, which began with the 1839-1860 Opium Wars and ended with the 1949 communist takeover – a period that China bitterly refers to as its “century of humiliation.”

China Expansion Plan |  Picture: Mirror Business

China portrayed the 1997 restoration of its sovereignty over Hong Kong, following more than a century of British administration, as righting a historic injustice. Yet, as Hambantota shows, China is now establishing its own Hong Kong-style neocolonial arrangements. Apparently Xi’s promise of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is inextricable from the erosion of smaller states’ sovereignty.4

Just as European imperial powers employed gunboat diplomacy to open new markets and colonial outposts, China uses sovereign debt to bend other states to its will, without having to fire a single shot. Like the opium the British exported to China, the easy loans China offers are addictive. And, because China chooses its projects according to their long-term strategic value, they may yield short-term returns that are insufficient for countries to repay their debts. This gives China added leverage, which it can use, say, to force borrowers to swap debt for equity, thereby expanding China’s global footprint by trapping a growing number of countries in debt servitude.

Even the terms of the 99-year Hambantota port lease echo those used to force China to lease its own ports to Western colonial powers. Britain leased the New Territories from China for 99 years in 1898, causing Hong Kong’s landmass to expand by 90%. Yet the 99-year term was fixed merely to help China’s ethnic-Manchu Qing Dynasty save face; the reality was that all acquisitions were believed to be permanent.

China Harbour Engineering Co Ltd | The last contractor for the Hambatota Proect

Now, China is applying the imperial 99-year lease concept in distant lands. China’s lease agreement over Hambantota, concluded this summer, included a promise that China would shave $1.1 billion off Sri Lanka’s debt. In 2015, a Chinese firm took out a 99-year lease on Australia’s deep-water port of Darwin – home to more than 1,000 US Marines – for $388 million.

Similarly, after lending billions of dollars to heavily indebted Djibouti, China established its first overseas military base this year in that tiny but strategic state, just a few miles from a US naval base – the only permanent American military facility in Africa. Trapped in a debt crisis, Djibouti had no choice but to lease land to China for $20 million per year. China has also used its leverage over Turkmenistan to secure natural gas by pipeline largely on Chinese terms.

Several other countries, from Argentina to Namibia to Laos, have been ensnared in a Chinese debt trap, forcing them to confront agonizing choices in order to stave off default. Kenya’s crushing debt to China now threatens to turn its busy port of Mombasa – the gateway to East Africa – into another Hambantota.

These experiences should serve as a warning that the BRI is essentially an imperial project that aims to bring to fruition the mythical Middle Kingdom. States caught in debt bondage to China risk losing both their most valuable natural assets and their very sovereignty. The new imperial giant’s velvet glove cloaks an iron fist – one with the strength to squeeze the vitality out of smaller countries.

- Brahma Chellaney | | Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin,

Project Syndicate

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Why Do North Koreans Hate USA? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War.

“WHY DO THEY hate USA.?”

It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images via The Intercept

Let’s be clear: There is no doubt that the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea both fear and loathe the United States. Paranoia, resentment, and a crude anti-Americanism have been nurtured inside the Hermit Kingdom for decades. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).

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U.S. Dropped 23,144 Bombs on Muslim-Majority Countries in 2015

Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim.

The chart, provided by the generally pro-State Department think tank, puts in stark terms how much destruction the U.S. has leveled on other countries. Whether or not one thinks such bombing is justified, it's a blunt illustration of how much raw damage the United States inflicts on the Muslim world:

Sources: Estimate based upon Combined Forces Air Component Commander 2010-2015 Airpower Statistics; Information requested from CJTF-Operation Inherent Resolve Public Affairs Office, January 7, 2016; New America Foundation (NAF); Long War Journal (LWJ); The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).

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Why USA Destroyed Libya?

United States and its allies are the new colonizers in Africa. They had to destroy the richest countries in Africa, Libya.

A school bombed by NATO forces in August 2011

Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday, after US President Barack Obama ordered a new bombing campaign in Libya.

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Rebels Admit Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attack

Militants tell AP reporter they mishandled Saudi-supplied chemical weapons, causing accident
Paul Joseph Watson
August 30, 2013

Syrian rebels in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta have admitted to Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak that they were responsible for last week’s chemical weapons incident which western powers have blamed on Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, revealing that the casualties were the result of an accident caused by rebels mishandling chemical weapons provided to them by Saudi Arabia.

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NATO's Afghan Victory 'Hoax' Fully Exposed

The ferocious attack of Afghan Taliban on Camp Bastion military base in Helmand province of Afghanistan is quite telltale. The base is in the use of both the British and American armies, where on four-month duty tour is stationed as well Prince Harry, the third in the British line of succession. Although he is under the Taliban’s life threat, their spokesman has announced that the Saturday’s attack on the Camp Bastion was meant to avenge the American sacrilegious film derogatory of Islam. 

Prince Harry (Photo: cp24.com

Whatever it is, the deadly Taliban assault has neatly knocked the bottom out of the hoax that both the British and American military high commands have bee parading now for quite some time. They assert that Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban insurgency, which has been primarily under the operational command of the British military since 2006, has been pacified. So much so, the British military commanders have lately been telling their political bosses that the province stands so much secured that the Afghan security forces can now easily control it.

Indeed, on this plea they have just recently even recommended to their government that many more than 500 British soldiers from their 9,000-strong military contingent in Afghanistan they had originally planned could be pulled out by this year’s end. The attack puts paid to their pretence. But then the commanders of the occupation armies have in effect fought the Afghan war throughout on lies and deceptions, not in the battlefield. It is they alone and their gullible political masters who talk of successes. But even their own soldiers confide to their private interlocutors that they have lost the war.

And for this, the military commanders and their naïve governments are squarely to blame. They showed not the spine and the initiatives when they should have. They just kept fiddling with the war, while the Taliban and other insurgent groups were all the while regrouping in their erstwhile strongholds and rearming lethally. And when at long last they ventured out of their Kabul and Bagram redoubts in 2006, they had already lost the war. Not only the Taliban and other insurgents had entrenched in their bastions unconquerably and were resurgent, expanding beyond their strongholds, they were also running parallel governments over a vast stretch of land.

In itself, the 2014 pullout of occupation armies is a big hoax, indeed. It is not the withdrawal of victorious armies. Verily, it is an organised retreat of defeated armies. Some in fact have already hit the retreat. The Dutch and the Canadians have long gone, leaving behind their operational grounds of Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces respectively in turmoil and in the hands of insurgents. The French are flapping their wings feverishly to get out all their troops by this year’s end. Not much could be said about the presence of the other occupation armies till 2014 as the public opinion in all the contributing nations is veering round to quick pullout of their soldiers. In America itself, public pressure is building up fast to this effect.

This public sentiment has been spurred greatly by the growing murderous attacks of Afghan security personnel on their foreign trainers and mates. In fact, the Afghan war, by every account, is now an increasingly unpopular war in every country that has contributed troops to the occupation coalition. And to the great discomfiture of its military commanders and their governments, who all have all long fed their peoples with lies and deceits on their war efforts. They will have much explaining to do to their publics on the expending of so much of blood and treasure on a war that palpably is leaving Afghanistan in no peace but only in turbulence. A patchwork of what the occupiers are boastfully, albeit deceitfully, branding as the Afghan national army and police, predictably will be unable to withstand the fury of the resistance forces that are giving such a tough time to highly-trained occupiers laced with arms from foot to teeth. 

Perceptive Afghanistan-watchers are indeed already predicting a terrible civil strife engulfing the wretched country in times ahead. So much so, a British parliamentary secretary is pleading vehemently for dividing up Afghanistan into eight autonomous regions to avert this eventuality. But it is the Afghans themselves who will eventually decide their destiny, not the outsiders. And certainly the coming times do not bode well for the country and its people. The future, nonetheless, will tell which way the camel ultimately sits in the country. But the hoax of the occupiers, now getting exposed inch by inch, is sure to finally explode thunderously to their utter shame and disgrace.



Reference: Hoax exposed, The Frontier Post

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CIA's 'vengeful librarians' stalk Twitter and Facebook

In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following Twitter and Facebook in an effort to stay ahead of America's enemies. 

At the agency's Open Source Centre, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms - anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly. 

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. 

They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, said the centre's director, Doug Naquin. 

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counter proliferation. But its several hundred analysts - the actual number is classified - track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan. 

While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout US embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."

Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open source officer," Naquin said. 

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said. 

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day. 

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion. 

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by languages. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. 

Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations. 

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South Korea drops news leaflets and food across North Korea

Saturday 26 th February, 2011

Reuters Friday.

South Korea's air force has begun dropping news leaflets across North Korea containing information on uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, in a bid to enourage the public to think about change.

South Korea’s air force has been dropping leaflets in North Korean cities informing the local people of mass uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, a member of parliament told 

The South has been dropping news releases to inform the people of North Korea of unprecedented events in North Africa and the Middle East as part of a psychological effort aimed at mobilising the people to call for change.

Along with the leaflets, the South Korean military has also dropped packages containing food, medicine and radios, said parliament member Song Young-sun, who insisted they aren’t trying to incite a revolution, but are encouraging the people to think about change.

North Korea, like Myanmar, is one of the most tightly-controlled and repressive regimes in the world. The government has vast control over the people, making an Egyptian-style uprising unthinkable.

World leaders in recent years have been quick to court Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Now they are just as quick to distance themselves from him as the world finally focuses on his 42 years of injustice and repression, just as the people of Libya look set to depose him

“You’re never going to be able to predict a collapse until the day it happens, but even then, this is a much more perfectly closed society with control over information and travel,” said Cho Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification.

Cho Min added that the leaflets were likely to cause fear rather than calls for change, especially if they contain any criticism of Kim Jong-il.

South Korea has dropped leaflets in the North before, usually in packages containing anti-North Korea messages, as well as foreign currency. 

Big News Network 

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