Samoa to Cancel $100M Chinese-Backed Port Development
21 May 2021
Samoa’s expected new prime minister said Thursday she plans to cancel a China-backed port development project on the island worth $100 million out of concern Samoa is already overly indebted to Beijing.
“Samoa is a small country. Our seaports and our airports cater for our needs,” Fiame Naomi Mataafa (pictured) told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“It’s very difficult to imagine that we would need the scale that’s being proposed under this particular project when there are more pressing projects that the government needs to give priority to,” Fiame said.
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Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Benjamin Barton, assistant professor in the School of Politics, History and International Relations at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, is the 272nd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Explain China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the context of EU-China security cooperation.
EU-China security cooperation has largely remained rhetorical in form, despite sporadic instances of actual practical cooperation/coordination. The BRI could potentially unlock further avenues for bilateral security cooperation given the high stakes of security risks which could derail its progress and also the fact that its land and maritime routes traverse regions where the EU shares overlapping security concerns with China. There is a sense that even if
3 May 2021
Tehran has signed on for China’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project, Iran Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami declared Monday.
Eslami said the BRI developed by China includes “major information technology plans” that are projected to be worth billions of dollars to the country, Tasnim News Agency reports.
In February, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif hailed the close cooperation between Tehran and Beijing as a “win-win interaction,” saying such strategic relations help both countries expand their global footprint.
In an article written for
The People’s Daily on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Iran and China, Zarif expressed hope Iran would play a greater role in the BRI, as part of Tehran’s push for a global infrastructure development strategy to link Asia, Europe and beyond.
Northeast China: Still Waiting for Regionalism
China’s rust belt is a case study in how local conditions and priorities can clash with grand plans for economic integration.
By
May 03, 2021
Workers watch a machine work at a construction site across the Tumen river, the border river between North Korea and China, in Yanbian, China’s Jilin province, Sunday, Sept. 10, 2017.
Credit: AP Photo
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China’s integration into the global economy is traditionally viewed by external audiences through the lens of power projection. At the center of this lies China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is being countered by a U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy that President Joe Biden reaffirmed with Quad allies in March. Such outreach by China, in particular in the context of the BRI, has raised debates about neocolonialism.