03-01 Geopolitics

When my wife and I met young students everywhere in China in 1985 that spoke perfect English it was a signal that the Communist Party had a long-term strategic interest in challenging the dominant position of the US in the world. Let’s just call it Chinese geopolitics.
And one of the first rules for understanding a nation’s geopolitics is to follow the money. It starts with public investment that leads to private investment that leads to trade. And then trade that needs to be protected by navies.
To be more particular it is trade based on China’s need for resources and China’s need for markets for its emerging technologies. China wants to sell things like electric vehicles, clean energy, artificial intelligence, railway infrastructure, maritime engineering facilities like ports, telecommunications equipment and much more.
Most of us as young history students heard about the old “silk roads” which were routes for taking Chinese silk products to the markets in Asia.
The map gives a simplistic view of what they call the new silk roads which is planned to link 68 countries by land and sea. It is also called the “One Belt One Road” project estimated to include investment expenditures over time of about $9 trillion dollars.
Of particular interest is a recently established investment bank created by China called the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) which has about 80 investors including 17 nations of the EU. Pretty serious competition for the World Bank which is a US-linked investment bank. Naturally AIIB is a big investor of the One Belt One Road project.
But the Silk Road projects are only part of China’s long-term geopolitics. They are heavy investors in Africa and Latin America. There is something like 10,000 Chinese companies invested in Africa. That should tell you something since the large ones are state owned.
There is African platinum and cobalt. And African gold, manganese and uranium. Then we have critical sources of rare earth metals so important in electronic devices like cell phones.
And in Latin America there are critical supplies of crude oil, nickel and copper.
And in both Africa and Latin America, China is investing in critical infrastructure to facilitate local economic development and trade.
What is most interesting is that China’s investment and trade patterns are really no different than the geopolitics of the US following WW2.
The big difference is that China lacks the US navy and military might. But that is just the next stage in the geopolitics of China, and the basis of a new cold war.