China is
making inroads into Central and Eastern Europe. In recent years, as the crisis
in the European Union bears down on Western Europe's economic vitality, the
capacity to fund and invest in peripheral regions like the Balkans and Baltics
has waned. As a result these countries have begun to seek supplemental sources
of capital, technology and trade. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe
are looking to develop low-level commercial ties outside their immediate
neighborhood in order to reduce their near-total reliance on Russia and the EU.
Chinese
investment in Central and Eastern Europe is sure to grow in the coming years,
but will be constrained both by logistical and political-administrative
factors, as well as the region's basic geopolitical reality. In the near term,
China looks to Central and Eastern Europe primarily as a market for its own
strategic industries and perhaps another window into Western European markets.
In the long term, it may seek to utilize rail and other infrastructure
investments into the region to build more integrated trans-Eurasian transport
systems……Such a network, if ever realized, would eventually link together disaggregated
investments from inland China
and Xinjiang to Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia and on to Western
Europe. Needless to say, the constraints on building overland ties across
Eurasia -- and especially through South Asia and the Middle East, as envisioned
in China's long-discussed Iron Silk Road plan -- are enormous, both
logistically and politically. But then so were the constraints on the Great
Wall……Read more: (Subscription required)
My Take –
This is…in my opinion….as delusionary as most of China’s economy. I like the Silk Road analogy because it demonstrates
the weakness in all of this; time and space!
There is no natural connection emotionally, intellectually, culturally
or geographically. As for the Great Wall
analogy; I think that presents a false narrative implying the wall was
successful. To some extent it was, but
in reality it was militarily indefensible.
In order to have access to China’s interior all the ‘barbarian nomadic
tribes’ had to concentrate their forces at any one point in the wall and it
would have been impossible to repel them.
There were thousands of miles of Wall and communications was a serious
problem. At one point the Wall was
attacked and it took two weeks for the troops to become aware. The wall could be breached in that time. Admittedly, there were a lot of soldiers
assigned to the wall as a whole, but there were never very many at any one
point, and it would take some time to muster enough from the rest of the wall,
wherein the attacking force would merely move a contingent to a now weakened
part of the wall. Smoke signals were
used later, but that still didn’t solve the problem of moving the troops in
sufficient numbers and bad weather would have rendered smoke signals useless.
Economically it was
a constant drain on China, not to mention that maintaining the wall, and supplying the soldiers had to be a
logistical nightmare , since much of it was built over terrain
that was waterless, mountainous, largely uninhabited and had no local supply of
food or water. From my point of view it was a long term
failure, and a waste as the ‘ultimate’ defense system, much the same as Hadrian’s
Wall in England, or better yet, the Maginot Line in France.
The same weaknesses
exist in their economic plans, big, cumbersome and poorly thought out. They have the example of Hong Kong, which
they have avoided reforming into the economic system that rules the rest of
China because it is successful. So why
don’t they adopt the same program for the rest of the nation? Because it’s all about power and control, which
brings me to another point. The
corruption among China’s ‘elite’ is staggering.
Many have foreign accounts and are fleeing the country with billions,
but when escaping one has to have somewhere to go. Could this be part of an elaborate escape plan
for these elites down the road? Does that
seem like a strange thought? Perhaps,
but nothing is ever as it seems in China and we should remember that China has a lot of history, and the Chinese are
complicated thinkers.
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