Top Left Link Buttons
  • English
  • German

Economic development updates

Category Archives

Former German Ambassador to China Calls for Joining Silk Road

Jan. 4–Former German Ambassador to China and current head of the Herbert Quandt Foundation (BMW) Michael Schaefer, calls on Europeans to accept China’s offer of partnership in the New Silk Road in an interview with “Deutsche Wirtschaftsnachrichten.”

Schaefer blasts Europe’s reaction to the New Silk Road policy and accuses the Europeans of projecting their own thinking when they accuse China of hegemonic intentions. Even if not in explicit terms, he calls for rejecting the wrong geopolitical approach in favor of a win-win relationship.

“The geostrategic significance of the Silk Road cannot be underestimated. The Middle Kingdom has set itself to deploy its giant material resources for the expansion of the Chinese economy on the world market. China is carrying out this strategy in an intelligent way, not aggressively but by offering participation to all states– an offer that slowly is being accepted by the small Asian and central Asian countries, whereas in Europe we have a mostly negative reaction, if not a rejection. Here they accuse China of hegemonic intentions– a projection of our own behavior in the last century?”

“Many Europeans make the big mistake of looking at the relationship with the USA and China as a zero-sum game. But a close relationship with the USA does not at all exclude an interest-based relationship with China. We should not see China as a rival, but rather as a partner in key sectors. I am convinced that China wants to be a partner of the West. At least, China does not pursue military dominance and a geostrategic hegemonic position, but it will defend what it believes are its legitimate interests, in particular its territorial interests, with energy, if necessary also through a projection of its military power.”

Schaefer has met Xi Jinping several times, and in 2009, he accompanied him on five-day visit in Germany. Xi, Schaefer says, “radiates an impressive interior calm, fitting with his policy. He proceeds calmly, unagitated and strategically, making China fit for the challenges in the future. Don’t expect a rush job from him. He, like many Chinese, thinks in long time-periods. He is driven by the knowledge that China was the largest national economy in the world until the middle of the nineteenth century, and it will be so again in the future. For the Chinese it is not a matter of ten or twenty years. During his visit to Germany, he showed interest in our development, especially in economic-technological but also in social areas, like no one else I have ever seen.”

The Chinese system is one capable of learning, Schaefer says, explaining how it can react more quickly and better than western systems in changing its economic model. Political stability in China will depend on whether the system delivers on its promises. “Basically, we must presume that even a communist single party will be accepted as long as it delivers stability and welfare. Chinese culture is strongly influenced by Confucianism. This is no religion, but a regulatory philosophy. One of its main features is respect. For instance, respect of children for their parents, but also respect for higher entities. They pursue a harmonically functioning society where– differently from us–no excessive significance is attributed to individual self-realization.”


Spain Proposes Role in Chinese-Ibero-American Nuclear Projects

April 2, 2018 -Eduardo Aymerich, Director General of the Spanish Nuclear Group for Cooperation (SNGC), a consortium formed by four Spanish nuclear companies, told Xinhua during the March 28-31 International Fair of China’s Nuclear Industry in Beijing, that SNGC wants to partner with Chinese nuclear companies in Ibero-America. He cited the example of China’s contracts to build two nuclear plants in Argentina, explaining that “in addition to our specialized services, we know the region and share the culture, so that we could be a connecting bridge between the Argentine client and the Chinese supplier.”

SNGC, he added, is interested in working with China in other countries also, naming the UK, Turkey, Romania, and South Africa, in particular. Two SNGC officials attending the fair, noted that doing business in China is, itself, a challenge, because of the speed at which it is developing.

“The Chinese nuclear sector has developed a great deal in recent years. The challenge now is to offer them innovative technologies which interest them,” Aymerich told Xinhua. Jose Garcia, head of international development at ENUSA, the nuclear fuel processing company in SNGC, called the Chinese market very competitive for Spanish companies “because in five years the product which you sell them will be left behind.”

Spain’s nuclear industry needs business abroad to stay alive, because, while nuclear power supplies around 20% of the nation’s electricity (with seven plants still operating), the insane predominance of anti-nuclear greenies in the nation is blocking all needed expansion. Between them, the four companies making up the SNGC consortium manufacture and operate nuclear safety valves, steam generators, and other components, and fuel, and provide engineering, inspection, and training services.

China’s nuclear industry fair had more than 200 companies and institutions participating from more than 50 countries and regions.


Japan Seeks Cooperation with China in Africa

Jan. 2 -As reported in the {Yomiuri Shimbun}, the government of Japan will ask China to join in Japan’s development projects in Africa. This is a substantial shift in Japan’s traditional practice to only fund Japanese projects abroad. (It would fit Europe as well to also begin such kind of cooperation with China and Japan in African projects. So far, Europe has been more than reluctant to do so.)

The four projects Tokyo is considering for Chinese participation are: the “Growth Ring” plan to link West African nations via major roadways; development and improvement of roads and bridges in Kenya; development and improvement of the “International Corridor” road that connects cities in Cameroon and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville); and road improvement in Rwanda.

The “Growth Ring” project is a 3,200 km road running in a huge loop from north to south, linking Burkina Faso with Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Togo, and the 1,000 km road stretching east to west, connecting five countries from Nigeria to Ivory Coast. The project is expected to create a new economic bloc by connecting Nigeria, which has a relatively large economy, with other countries in the region.

Improving Kenya’s transportation system is part of the Japanese development assistance for Mombasa Port, which serves as an international trade hub in the eastern region of the continent. Japan has dominated the work for the port’s development project, but now hopes to divide responsibilities with China on the project to develop and improve a road and a bridge connecting the port with the adjacent area. For the “International Corridor” project and the road work in Rwanda, Japan will partially finance them and encourage Chinese entities to take part in the projects.

Africa is expected to see explosive population growth and is deemed to be the last mega-market.


China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan Port Reaches Record 1 Billion Tons in Annual Cargo

Dec. 27, 2017 – Xinhua reports, today, that the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, located in the eastern Chinese province of hejiang, has reached the unprecedented rate of 1 billion tons of annual cargo; it will be the first port in the world to exceed such volume by year’s end.

According to Mao Jianhong, chairman of the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port Group, the port has expanded cooperation with major shipping companies and harbors along the Belt and Road, and has added five new sea routes to bring its total to 86. It has also signed cooperation agreements with twenty other ports.

The Ningbo-Zhoushan port is located at the meeting point of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, directly south of Shanghai and southeast of the port of Hangzhou. It is China’s busiest port, with 242 sea routes linking more than 600 harbors around the world, Xinhua reports.

In the course of 2017, Mao explained, Ningbo-Zhoushan handled over 10 million standard containers from countries and regions along the Belt and Road, a 16% year-on-year increase.

Moreover, the port launched sea-rail transport services with 11 trains providing services to 36 cities in 14 Chinese provinces, as well as to countries in central and northern Asia and Eastern Europe. In 2018, container and handling volume of the port’s sea-rail transport is expected to exceed 400,000 standard containers, a 60% increase year on year.


Ethiopia-China Cooperation Deepening

Dec. 23 -As the Ethiopia-China Economic, Trade and Cultural Cooperation Forum is currently underway in Hangzhou, China, the Ethiopian government envisaged the forum to provide a new impetus to the comprehensive partnership  between the two countries. The forum kicked off on Dec. 20. According to the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the forum is one major result of the longstanding relations that the two countries have enjoyed for many years. “Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, the two countries have steadily strengthened a relationship based on their common interests. The two countries have also been and are working closely together in regional and international matters,” the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Dec. 21.

Foreign Minister Aklilu Hailemichael praised the government and people of China for playing a prominent role in his country’s economic boom. “The Ethiopia-China Economic, Trade and Cultural Cooperation Forum will further enhance the multifaceted ties between the two countries,” the statement quoted Hailemichael as saying.

Hailemichael has also briefed participants of the forum regarding Ethiopia’s untapped human and natural resources,  together with Addis Ababa’s commitment to promoting investment schemes in the East African country.

China, Ethiopia’s largest trading partner, is a major player in Ethiopia’s investment, trade and diplomatic landscape. In just the past two decades, Chinese companies have invested close to $4 billion in Ethiopia. According to the Ethiopian Investment Commission, the bilateral trade volume also reached $6.37 billion in 2015.

The recently published McKinsey report also indicated that Ethiopia, together with South Africa, has developed a robust partnership” with China, along with a high degree of economic engagement in the form of investment, trade, loans, and aid.


China Signed 100 Agreements with 86 Countries in 2017

Dec. 23 -Some 86 countries and international organizations have signed 100 cooperation agreements with China under the Belt and Road Initiative. He Lifeng, head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said the initiative made major headway in 2017, citing progress in key areas including capacity, investment and the Digital Silk Road.

Steady progress was made in the building of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Mombasa-Nairobi railway has been put into operation, construction has begun on the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the Hungary-Serbia railway and the Khalifa Port in the United Arab Emirates, the operation of the Hambantota Port has also been transferred to a Chinese firm, said He. So far, cargo train have made more than 7,000 trips between China and Europe, according to He.


Silk Road Hub in Vienna Will Create Up to 140,000 New Jobs

Dec. 22, 2017 -The connection of the Austrian capital via a broad-gauge rail track with the Slovakian city Kosice, and the construction of large freight logistics facilities at Parndorf, near Vienna, will create up to 140,000 new permanent jobs, transport experts working for the implementation of the project are forecasting. The project is named as a priority in the national infrastructure development plan of the new Austrian government. Once completed, the Parndorf freight terminal will handle 54 container freight trains from China weekly. Now: Will the EU give its member Austria financial support, or will the Austrians have to rely on China–as do numerous countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, with their own infrastructure projects?


Growing Interest in France in New Silk Road

Dec. 22, 2017 -When the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS) opened online registrations for the first Paris Forum on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in November, there were so many requests that IRIS had to close registrations earlier than expected. “The Paris Forum is an opportunity to work very concretely on projects of common interest,” former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told Xinhua. The BRI has allowed different countries to sit down around a table to discuss cooperation, and multilateral dialogue is a good model for cooperation, especially for today’s world, explained another former Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, president of the Prospective and Innovation Foundation. Raffarin represented President Macron at the May Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing. The BRI is also one of the responses to multilateralism, which “can create closer Franco-Chinese collaboration,” said IRIS director Pascal Boniface.

The initiative obviously benefits more “Made in France” products and French companies, experts say. One example is the Lyon-Wuhan freight rail line, which was launched in April 2016. Since then, thousands of bottles of Bordeaux wine, other French agricultural products, and auto parts have been exported to China. In addition, communication between Chinese and French communities is becoming increasingly open and transparent, they said.


New Perspectives For Afghanistan: CEPC China-Pakistan Econ Corridor

Dec. 26 – In the first-ever trilateral meeting, foreign ministers of China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan reaffirmed their commitment to improving their relations, deepening mutually beneficial cooperation, advancing connectivity under China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, and fighting terrorism in all its forms and manifestation without any distinction, PTI Islamabad reported today.  Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted the first China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Foreign Ministers’

Dialogue in Beijing with Afghanistan and Pakistan Foreign Ministers, respectively Salahuddin Rabbani and Khawaja Muhammad Asif.

In his proposal to extend their $57 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan, Wang, talking to the reporters, pointed to Afghanistan’s urgent need to develop and

improve people’s lives, and his hopes it can join inter-connectivity initiatives. “So China and Pakistan are willing to look at–with Afghanistan, on the basis of win-win– mutually beneficial principles, using an appropriate way,” he said, Afghanistan’s TOLONews reported.

In his bilateral meeting with the Afghan Foreign Minister Rabbani, Wang said China hoped to synergize its development strategy for Afghanistan and expand bilateral cooperation. China expected to see a wide and inclusive political reconciliation process in Afghanistan, led and owned by the Afghan people, he said, Afghanistan’s Pajhwok reported. Rabbani, welcoming the proposal and hailing China as a reliable partner, said his country was ready to actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, and enhance cooperation with China in areas of inter-connectivity, infrastructure and energy.


Helga Zepp-LaRouche Makes ‘An Appeal to American Citizens: What the World Needs from America!’

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

We have come to the point where the citizens of the United States need to recall the best tradition of their history: the American Revolution, the War of Independence against the British Empire, the principles expressed in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and the principles of the American System of economics as developed by Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Henry C. Carey.

The essence of all these aspects of U.S. history is very clearly stated in the Preamble to the Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. “

This intention of the Constitution, expressed in the preamble, to promote the general Welfare not only for the present generation, but also for all future generations, contains an implicit rejection of the so-called “shareholder value” policy and the unbridled free trade of globalization, promoted then and now by the British Empire, which has not only widened the gap in the United States itself between a caste of increasingly rich billionaires and the growing numbers of the impoverished, but is also responsible for the catastrophic underdevelopment in so-called developing countries.

Clearly, the world will never return to the status quo that existed before the coronavirus pandemic broke out. We are at an absolute turning point in history, where we will either be able to put the world in order with the program we have outlined in these pages, to defeat underdevelopment, or we are threatened with plunging into a dark age. The phase of unrestricted globalization, which the protagonists of a unipolar world have attempted to implement, in particular after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and which led to a global wave of protests, including the election of Donald Trump, is over for good.

Lyndon LaRouche had forecast the catastrophe now unfolding before our eyes in all its aspects, from his characterization of President Nixon’s disastrous destruction of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and his forecasts of the danger of pandemics resulting from the monetarist policy, to the systemic collapse of the financial system. During the same time, spanning half a century, he presented an unprecedented number of solutions for overcoming the crises in the United States and internationally, and it is in that same spirit that the program herein has been conceived.

Any honest person who reads these analyses and programmatic proposals today, in light of the current pandemic and the destruction of the real economy, will conclude that Lyndon LaRouche was a man of providence. The idea of providence is not meant here in a strictly religious sense, but in that his entire method of thinking was so highly in accordance with the principles of the physical universe, that his analyses and creative proposals were of a tremendous, almost prophetic precision. He thought and worked “in tune” with the intention of the universe, and if correctly understood, of the Creator.

Therefore, the greatest crime committed against LaRouche by his unjust jailing and lifelong vilification by that same McCarthyite apparatus that is responsible for the ongoing coup attempt against President Trump, is not only the outrageous injustice done to LaRouche personally, but above all that it has made it extremely difficult for Americans and others around the world to have access to these solutions. In many ways, the enormous hardships that the population now endures due to the combination of pandemics and the economic crisis are the result of the political persecution of this extraordinary thinker. And unfortunately, his warning that no one would be safe if his persecution were tolerated has been borne out. When one considers, for example, how General Flynn has been and will be prosecuted, the famous quote by Martin Niemöller comes to mind: “When the Nazis came for the Communists, I was silent; I wasn’t a communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I was silent; I wasn’t a social democrat. When they came for the trade-unionists, I was silent; I wasn’t a trade unionist.”

It is past time for Lyndon LaRouche, the man and his ideas, to be fully exonerated, and I personally call on President Trump to do so.

But Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas are alive, as this program for the creation of 1.5 billion new, productive jobs worldwide underscores. The United States has now reached a breaking point in its history, where the ideas in the tradition of the pledge of the U.S. Constitution will be realized, or the financial reconquest of the American colony by the British Empire will plunge the entire world, together with the United States, into a dark age. This is the time when the demand that Nicholas of Cusa, who had already laid the foundation for the American Republic back in the 15th century with his works, set out in his Concordantia Catholica, has become a question of survival for the entire world. He established that the only legitimate basis for a nation’s existence is its commitment to the common good of all nations, and to such a relationship among all nations. Precisely that was the intention of Benjamin Franklin, of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence against the British Empire. It was also the foreign policy conception of President John Quincy Adams, that the United States should be part of an alliance of completely independent sovereign republics, linked together by a common idea, and that America was not called upon to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

The key to building such an urgently needed alliance today is positive cooperation between the United States and China. The coronavirus pandemic has made it undeniably clear that the hollowed-out combined industrial capacity of the global economy is nowhere near sufficient to feed and to sustain in dignity the world population today. Cooperation between the two largest economies in the world is therefore an essential prerequisite for overcoming the impact of pandemics, starvation and poverty in Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia and even regions in Europe and the United States.

Although, thanks to the manipulations of the British secret services and Anglophile politicians in the U.S., a great deal of damage has been done to the U.S.-China relation through the “blame game” regarding the origin and handling of the coronavirus, and although the current “China-bashing” evokes the darkest memories of the McCarthy period, constructive cooperation between the United States and China not only is absolutely possible, but also points the way toward a new era in human history. This era must be characterized by the overcoming of geopolitics and the promotion of the general welfare of all nations on this planet.

Given the existential problems that many people in America are facing due to the pandemic, there may not be much public awareness of the huge gap that exists between the image the United States enjoyed in the world at the time of the American Revolution and during the presidencies of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the United States that has waged endless wars throughout the world since the end of the Soviet Union under the Bush and Obama Administrations. America was once regarded by all republican circles around the world as a temple of liberty and a beacon of hope, as a country whose Constitution served as a model for republican aspirations in many countries around the world. But the admiration and friendship gave way during the Bush and Obama Administrations to fear, or worse, U.S. military power.

It is five minutes to midnight to deliver on the promise for a constructive relationship with President Xi Jinping and China that emerged in the early days of the Trump Administration. Given the complete discrediting of “Russiagate” and the likely legal proceedings against the British-inspired coup plotters, nothing stands in the way of constructive cooperation between the United States and Russia, as has been indicated between NASA and Roscosmos. If the U.S. now takes the lead in the economic reconstruction program and the creation of 1.5 billion productive jobs in the world, and helps to make the New Silk Road become the World Land-Bridge, then the United States will regain the place it once had in the eyes of the whole world: as a pioneer of freedom and hope for all mankind.

— Helga Zepp-LaRouche
May 25, 2020


Page 45 of 57First...444546...Last