The PRC is more interested in assets and profitable concerns than sovereign bonds. Beijing craves control, not debt.
I had never heard of Cosco until a few daya ago. I would imagine that most of you are in the same boat as me. It’s an acronym for China Ocean Shipping Company. It is owned and controlled by Beijing. They call such companies SOEs – State Owned Enterprises. Very Orwellian.
As part and parcel of the mad Troika policy of selling Greek assets, Cosco is acquiring the Port of Piraeus…from where all those Flying Dolphin speedboats transport North European holidaymakers to the Greek islands.
A Slog source closely involved in the purchase has told me that the funds for the acquisition come from a ‘soft loan’ to this SOE direct from the Beijing government. A soft loan from the Chinese government is more or less one of those ‘family’ loans from which many of us have benefited over the years – whereby there is no more than a gentleman’s agreement that, after an indeterminate amount of time, the loan might be repaid at a minimal rate of interest.
As the source puts it:
“The acquisition of strategic holdings in the Club Med countries is a Chinese foreign policy objective with the intention of influencing Europe”. Further soft finance is always available to any SOE that can show it is furthering that objective.
The Chinese official handling the Piraeus acquisition is described as “third generation Party……not at the Red Prince level, but nevertheless very well connected”. In addition, I understand that China has offered two tranches of $5Bn each in loans to Greek shipowners – provided they contract new ships at Chinese yards.
The subtlety and determination of this Chinese approach to gaining influence underlines just what naive plonkers Sarkozy and his followers are in expecting China to invest in loo-paper bonds – when they can bypass all the red tape, and buy the solid stuff that really matters…far away from the glare of media spotlights and flash bulbs.
On Wednesday, China gently declined the eurozone’s generous offer to sell them bonds in a ragbag of disparate, undisciplined EU member States on the verge of various states of insolvent disrepair. Yesterday early afternoon, I received this affirmation of Beijing policy from a trusted Singaporean source:
“I would have no hesitation in accepting this version of events as genuine. The Beijing regime has adopted the precise same policy in South America and, more especially, in several black African countries. They buy into banks, goldfields, and all going concerns that fit with their policy. Indeed, in that context, I would imagine that senior Party officials in China were probably insulted by Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to sell them worthless bad debt.
I can well believe it. My original source had this to add in closing:
“There is an incoming team in China, who are reputedly more hardline than Wen Jiabao and his allies. So far as the Chinese population are concerned the Europeans are lazy and decadent, and deserve whatever is coming to them. Chinese culture is strong on ‘blame’ and very weak on ‘understanding’. Promises by China to ‘import more’ may safely be disregarded; you cannot alter the effects of decades of propaganda, urging people to import nothing but skills to be copied, overnight, and Chinese xenophobia is not diminishing.”
This is the second piece I’ve posted today about sweeping change just around the corner. I would accept all that: my own experience of the Chinese is that, by and large, they think Europeans to be oafs. I believe that China’s aim is self-sufficiency, not imperial ownership…..so note those words, ‘urging people to import nothing but skills to be copied’. But they have even less respect for one group lower than us in their estimations, and that’s black Africans….the ‘hakwoi’.
Some readers will dismiss these facts and interpretations as ‘racist’. But to do so is to make the Chinese point valid: such is intellectual laziness caused by thirty or more years of knee-jerk education. The last thing I am is racist about the Chinese: I am a great admirer of their stoicism and sense of duty. Forty-five years ago, I nearly married one. But like radical Islam, the ruthless Chinese drive to a situation wherein they can exist without anyone else is a major consideration when trying to judge what the world might be like the day after tomorrow.
I doubt very, very much if the elite running Britain at the moment spend too much time mulling such things. But Islamists and the Beijing politburo do. And when it comes to geopolitical strategy, these people absolutely outclass the Anglo-Saxon and Latin worlds.
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No future is set in stone. The most hilarious example I have encountered of this was the local Council member who, in central London in the 1880s, told his colleagues that, according to his calculations, Pall Mall would be three feet deep in horse-dung by 1937. The motor car had already been invented, but people tend to extrapolate the future as a sort of updated version of the present. It almost never is.
I am going to start a new devoted Page at The Slog, working title ‘Curved Balls’. Curved Balls are all those unknowns that make a nonsense of futurology bollocks, if you follow. I imagine it’ll be pretty random and not that regular. But hopefully, it’ll be interesting.
The Slog 