Cina, FDI, competizione internazionale
La Cina compete con l’Occidente negli aiuti ai suoi
vicini
JANE PERLEZ
La Cina sta facendo massicci prestiti con le sue riserve di
valuta forte (ammontanti a quasi 1 trilione di dollari) per grandi progetti nel
S-E Asia in paesi come Laos, Cambogia e Myanmar, o anche le Filippine, che erano
riserva della Banca Mondiale, dell’Asian Development Bank, di USA e Giappone.
I prestiti cinesi non pretendono condizioni per standard
ambientali o riorganizzazioni sociali, non prevedono penalità per corruzione, e
raramente richiedono costi aggiuntivi per consulenti.
La Cina approfitta delle infrastrutture aggiunte
nell’area confinante in sviluppo per accrescere gli scambi e trasferire le
risorse naturali dalla periferia al cuore del paese.
Liqun Jin, vice-presidente dell’ADB: la Cina ha studiato
attentamente come utilizzare la sua crescente ricchezza; il nuovo grande
attore è in grado di mutare profondamente il paesaggio degli aiuti allo
sviluppo.
Negli scorsi anni la Cina ha dato aiuti a paesi africani
da cui acquista petrolio e gas. Tra essi alcuni governi dittatoriali come Nigeria,
Sudan e Angola. Anche durante la guerra fredda la Cina ha stanziato aiuti in
Africa; ad es. negli anni 1960-70
all’angola per bilanciare gli aiti di Taiwan al Sud Africa.
Cambogia: Ingegneri del China Shanghai Construction
Group lavorano alla costruzione di una strada di 1200 miglia dal Sud Cina attraverso
il Laos fino al porto cambogiano di Sihanoukville.
Nella primavera 2006 la Cina ha offerto $600mn. alla Cambogia
per due grandi ponti vicino alla capitale Phnom Penh; per una centrale
idroelettrica e una rete a fibre ottiche, che connetterà le tlc cambogiane con
quelle di Vietnam e Tailandia.
Gli altri paesi donatori assieme hanno destinato solo $1mn.
più della Cina, con una serie di condizioni…
Allerta degli USA per le relazioni Cina-Cambogia.
Gli Usa si chiedono se la Cina abbia in progetto prestiti
alla Cambogia per un porto di alto mare a Sihanoukville che le fornirebbe una
base di scarico per le importazioni di petrolio dal MO.
La Cambogia avrebbe concesso i diritti per uno dei 5
campi petroliferi offshore, per il valore di $700-1000mn. l’anno. Chevron
ha già un accordo di esplorazione di uno dei campi.
Filippine: la Cina ha offerto un prestito di $2MD
l’anno per i prossimi 3 anni dalla sua Export-Import Bank, contro i $100mn.
offerti da BM e ADB, e il $1MD del Giappone ancora in trattative. L’improvvisa
notizia ha sorpreso anche perché le Filippine fanno da quartier generale
dell’ADB, controllata da Giappone e USA, di cui anche la Cina è azionista.
Dopo il ritiro delle sue truppe dall’Irak nel 2004, la
presidente delle Filippine ha perso i favori USA, e la Cina ha approfittato
della breccia economica, sono in via di completamento una serie di progetti,
tra cui due autostrade e la rete idrica per Manila, un collegamento ferroviaria
tra Manila Nord e 4 province.
Compete con la Cina per gli aiuti a Myanmar (ricca di
materie prime) solo l’India; Pechino ha costruito dighe e strade di
collegamento tra l’interno del paese e la Cina; starebbe costruendo un porto di
alto mare sulla costa occidentale.
Myanmar è in arretrato con il pagamento dei debiti alla BM e
non riceve aiuti dagli USA.
Laos, la Cina sta costruendo un’arteria stradale
strada principale, e la controversa diga Nam Theun 2
I paesi
donatori occidentali lamentano la segretezza dei progetti di aiuti cinesi, e il
suo rifiuto a coordinare le attività di aiuto nei PVS.Nyt 06-09-18
China Competes With West
in Aid to Its Neighbors
By JANE PERLEZ
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia
— In the dense humidity of northern Cambodia,
where canoes are the common mode of transportation, a foreman from a Chinese
construction company directs local laborers to haul stones to the ramp of a
nearly completed bridge.
Nearby, engineers
from the China Shanghai Construction Group have sunk more than a dozen concrete pylons across a tributary of
the mighty Mekong River, a technical feat that will help knit
together a 1,200-mile route from the southern Chinese city of Kunming
through Laos to the
Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand.
– This is the new face of China’s
foreign aid to poor Asian countries: difficult construction in remote places
that benefits the recipient, and China, too.
“It is the favor of our government to the
Cambodian people,” said Ge Zhen, 26, one of the more than 50 engineers and 250 other Chinese workers on the four-year
project.
– Flush with nearly a
trillion dollars in hard currency reserves and eager for stable friends in
Southeast Asia, China is making big loans for big projects to countries that
used to be the sole preserve of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the
United States and Japan.
With the Singapore
meeting of the World Bank on Sept. 19 and 20, China,
one of the bank’s biggest customers, is quietly shaking up the aid business in Asia, competing with the bank at its own game.
For poor countries like Cambodia, Laos
and Myanmar, and
somewhat better-off countries like the Philippines, China’s
loans are often more attractive than the complicated loans from the West.
– The Chinese money usually comes unencumbered with conditions for environmental
standards or community resettlement that can hold up major projects. The aid
does not carry penalties for corruption that are being increasingly used by the
World Bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz. And China’s offers rarely include the
extra freight of expensive consultants, provisions that are common to World
Bank projects.
– For its part, China benefits from the added infrastructure — roads,
ports and bridges — in the underdeveloped but growing region around it, to help
increase trade and to move natural resources from China’s periphery to its
heartland.
Liqun
Jin, vice president of the Asian Development Bank
and a former vice minister of finance in Beijing,
said in an interview at the bank’s headquarters in Manila
that China had carefully considered how to use its increasing wealth.
“China
is attracting external capital, and as a balance China wants to help developing
countries in the region by financing infrastructure projects,” Mr. Jin said.
“Helping your neighbors to have a good life is no sin.”
He added, “China makes no bones that we want a
peaceful neighborhood to develop our own economy.”
– The effects are likely to be enormous. Tom Crouch, country director
for the Philippines
at the Asian Development Bank, said, “Here comes a very large new player on the
block that has the potential of changing the landscape of overseas development
assistance.”
– Already, in the past several years, China has given aid to African
countries, where it is buying oil and gas. They include some with repressive
governments like Nigeria, Sudan and Angola.
– Even during the cold war, China
spread aid around Africa, sometimes to counterbalance assistance from rival
countries, which were being helped by Taiwan. In the 1960’s and 70’s, for
example, China aided Angola while Taiwan
helped neighboring South
Africa.
–
– In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen boasts of China’s
offer last spring of $600 million in “no strings
attached” loans, made during a visit from the Chinese prime minister, Wen
Jiabao. The money will help pay for two
major bridges near the capital, Phnom Penh,
that will link to a network of roads; a hydropower
plant; and a fiber-optic network
that will connect Cambodia’s
telecommunications with that of Vietnam
and Thailand.
In contrast, Mr. Hun Sen points out that the traditional lenders together
pledged just $1 million more than China.
And the money came laden with conditions, including World Bank anticorruption
clauses.
Four
World Bank programs in Cambodia
worth about $70 million were recently suspended by
the bank after its investigators found corruption among Cambodian officials in
the procurement process.
– China’s
generosity to Cambodia has
caught Washington’s
attention. The United States Navy is planning a port visit to Sihanoukville
early next year, a first since the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.
– In the Philippines, China is also making a big splash,
offering an extraordinary package of $2 billion in loans each year for the next
three years from its Export-Import Bank.
– That made the $200 million
offered separately by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank look puny, officials from those banks said, and easily outstripped a
$1 billion loan under negotiation with Japan.
Officially, the World Bank says it is not
concerned about competition from China’s increasingly energetic aid
program. “The more important impact of China
on these countries’ development is trade rather than aid,” said Homi Kharas,
the bank’s chief economist for East Asia and
the Pacific.
The
aid, chiefly for infrastructure, was being focused by China on the
integration of trade in the region, a useful result for poor countries, he
said.
– But Western aid donors complain that China is secretive about its aid projects,
and that it declines to attend the traditional meetings presided over by the
World Bank to coordinate aid activities in poor countries. They also say they
doubt that China
always delivers the full value of the projects that it announces.
– And Western aid officials said they were taken aback when the news
of the $2 billion Chinese aid package came out at a lunch meeting of more than
100 aid donors in Manila
last month. The size of the Chinese loans came as a shock, in part because the Philippines
serves as the headquarters of the Asian Development Bank, a lender dominated by
Japan and the United States. China is also a
shareholder.
The secretary general of the National Economic
and Development Authority in the Philippines, Romulo Neri, compared
the Chinese aid package to those from other sources, and noted the appealing
absence of the expensive consultant fees common to Western projects.
– After being a favorite of the Bush White House, the Philippine
president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, fell out of favor when she pulled her
country’s troops out of Iraq
in 2004.
– The Chinese appeared to have quickly filled the economic breach for
the Philippines and,
according to a memorandum from Mr. Neri’s office, a number of projects are
expected to be completed when Mr. Wen visits Manila in December.
They
include two toll roads and a water supply system for Manila,
and further financing for a rail project already under way to connect northern Manila with four
provinces.
In some countries, like Cambodia, China’s
construction projects seem clearly aimed at helping to assure China’s access
to natural resources.
– Western diplomats and aid officials in Phnom
Penh said they believed that Cambodia
had recently granted China the rights to one of five offshore oil
fields that could yield as much as $700 million to $1 billion a year. Chevron
already has an agreement for exploratory drilling at one of the Cambodian
fields.
– Washington does not know yet, and would
like to know, whether China
plans to offer loans for an often-discussed deep-sea port at Sihanoukville that
would allow China a
convenient delivery point for its Middle East
oil imports.
– In resource-rich Myanmar,
the former Burma, Beijing’s only real competitor on the aid front is India.
China has built dams and
roads connecting the interior of the country to China’s
southern flank, and is currently reported to be working on a deep-water port on
Myanmar’s
west coast.
Myanmar
is in deep arrears to the World Bank, which said it had no loan program there.
The United States
offers no official aid, either, because of the repressive nature of the
government.
– In Laos, China has built
a major road up the spine of the country, and has been influential as much by
the prospect of what it might do, than by what it has actually accomplished.
After years of study on the impact on the
environment, the World Bank broke ground on a environmentally controversial
major dam, known as Nam Theun 2, in Laos
last year, because it knew that China
was ready to step in to build the dam, bank officials say.
Beyond its no-strings approach, China
is often appreciated as a lender by poor countries because it is willing to
take on complicated projects in distant areas that others are not.
The bridge that Mr. Ge, the engineer, and his
colleagues have sweated over during the last four years — the temperature
creeps up as high as 106 in April — is in one of the most underdeveloped
corners of Southeast Asia, the area where the
Khmer Rouge first took power.
Running from the bridge is a new, smooth
130-mile road built by Mr. Ge’s team that connects Kratie, a village to the
south of Stung Treng, to the Laotian border.
“When we came here four years ago, we would
leave at breakfast time from Kratie and we would arrive here for dinner — eight
hours,” Mr. Ge said. “It now takes two hours.”
The New York Times