Extracts from Mary Anastasia O’Grady assessment of CCP expansionism into Latin America. Link to the WSJ essay:
How China Took Latin America
The Inter-American Development Bank opened doors all over the region for Beijing.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady July 31, 2022 WALL STREET JOURNAL https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-took-latin-america-beijing-nancy-pelosi-expansionism-taiwan-regimes-south-america-11659289457?mod=opinion_featst_pos1
It was chilling to read Beijing’s warning to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that if she goes ahead with her planned trip to Taiwan this week, it will “have a severe negative impact” on relations between the U.S. and China.
For a half-century, the West has been trying to bring China into the coalition of the civilized. Beijing has responded by beefing up its military, murdering students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and, more recently, snuffing out liberty in Hong Kong. Now it is rattling sabers at Taiwan.
Closer to the U.S., Chinese expansionism is equally troubling. The Middle Kingdom now has a strong presence in the Western Hemisphere, where it actively supports antidemocratic regimes while posing as a benevolent sugar daddy.
The State Department has been asleep at the switch, missing years of opportunities to correct the Chinese narrative that it is somehow in the region to “help” countries.
Sri Lanka learned about Chinese development assistance the hard way. It borrowed nearly $12 billion from Beijing in the first two decades of this century. As the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor reported in July, that money went “largely for a slate of major infrastructure projects that turned into white elephants—including a costly port facility” in Hambantota, hometown of the powerful Rajapaksa family, “which was effectively ceded to Chinese control half a decade ago after Sri Lankan authorities recognized they could no longer pay off the loans.”
Beijing is using the same kind of bait-and-switch all over Latin America. In Venezuela, China lent Hugo Chávez some $50 billion backed by oil. Judging from the train wreck that the country has become, it’s pretty clear that money wasn’t used for development. Venezuelan oil production has collapsed but the state-owned petroleum company still dutifully sends regular shipments to China to repay the loan…..
…..The Inter-American Development Bank, which is 30% owned by the U.S. and made China a member in 2009, has the most to answer for when it comes to explaining how China made deep inroads into the region in the last decade.
According to IDB data, between 2013 and May 2022 the bank put up $6.1 billion in co-financing for 91 projects with China. Beijing is only a 0.004% IDB shareholder but on top of that co-financing, according to an IDB official, “Chinese state-owned companies got $1.7bn worth of IDB-funded procurement contracts between 2010 and 2020, making it the top non-borrower recipient of such contracts. American companies won contracts worth $249 million.”….
….This is why the bank is trying to cultivate new partners, including Taiwan. China, predictably, is outraged. In a May email to the bank’s president and several IDB staff members, after a press release announced a project in Belize with Taiwanese backing, the Chinese representative to the IDB wrote: “My authorities see this as a very severe situation and reserve all the rights of further action.” Those who care about development can only hope that action might be for China to quit the bank and leave Latin America.
