China has invested billions of dollars in building a historic “mega-port” in Peru, which has the potential to transform trade in Latin America and kickstart regional economic development.
The United States has demonized this port and portrayed it as a threat, but Washington has not offered Peru any alternatives.
Instead of helping Peru construct a comparable infrastructure project, the US government was only willing to sell it used diesel trains from the 1980s.
Adding insult to injury, the Joe Biden administration falsely told the public that it “donated” these 40-year-old trains, but in reality Lima had to pay millions of dollars.
Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to Peru in November to attend the annual APEC summit. There, he inaugurated the massive Port of Chancay, on Peru’s Pacific coast.
The Port of Chancay will significantly reduce shipping time between Asia and Latin America from 35 days to just 23. It is also estimated to cut costs by 20%.
$1.3 billion has already been invested in the project, with plans to continue expanding and adding an industrial park, at a cost of $3.5 billion in total. It is projected to generate $4.5 billion in annual revenue.
US “alternative” for Lima: used diesel trains from 1985
Washington has shown outrage at the growing relationship between China and Peru.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also traveled to the South American nation in November. There, in an attempt to steal Xi’s thunder, he held a press conference.
Standing in front of 40-year-old trains bearing the US flag, Blinken announced that “the United States will support the city of Lima as it develops a new passenger train line”.
The White House published a fact sheet on “advancing the United States – Peru partnership” in which the Biden administration wrote that “California commuter rail line Caltrain will donate 90 passenger cars and 19 locomotives to the city of Lima”.
There was a major problem with this claim, however: it was false. The used trains were not a donation.
The local California press revealed that Caltrain had sold the trains to Lima for $6.32 million, after Caltrain had replaced its old diesel trains, which were built in 1985, with a more modern electric fleet.
On Twitter, video of Blinken’s Peru press conference received a community note that fact-checked his misleading statement.
Today we announced that the United States will support the city of Lima in building a new passenger train line that will expand access to reliable and affordable transportation for over 200,000 people every single day. pic.twitter.com/h1TGSHxriA
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) November 17, 2024
US media claims Peru is its colonial “backyard”; Trump advisor threatens tariffs
This incident was a striking symbol of the big differences between the foreign policy of China and that of the United States.
In fact, instead of offering to help Peru develop its infrastructure, US officials have responded by threatening the South American nation.
A top Latin America advisor to President-elect Donald Trump who served in his first administration and is now assisting his transition team, Mauricio Claver-Carone, suggested that the US government will impose 60% tariffs on goods that travel through the Port of Chancay.
Using colonial language, US media outlets like Newsweek depicted the Chinese-built port in Peru as a supposed threat “in America’s backyard”.
This condescending rhetoric is based on the 200-year-old colonial Monroe Doctrine, which top officials in the Trump administration invoked as part of an effort to reimpose US imperial hegemony in the region.
Political leaders in Latin America have long emphasized that their countries are not the “backyard” or territory of any foreign power; they are sovereign, independent nations.
Moreover, Peru is not even close geographically to the United States. The distance between US capital Washington, DC and Peru’s capital Lima is a staggering 5700 kilometers (more than 3500 miles).
China's Xi unveils megaport in America's backyard amid US concerns https://t.co/4W00Fkh1gN
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) November 15, 2024
The irony is that, while the US press demonizes China, Washington has a long history of meddling in Peru’s internal affairs and violating its sovereignty.
In 2022, the United States sponsored a coup that overthrew Peru’s democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo.
Peru’s current right-wing leader, Dina Boluarte, was never elected, and is so despised by her people that she has consistently had a single-digit approval rating.
Boluarte has also shown herself to be extremely pro-US. But China is Peru’s largest trading partner, with which it does 32% of its trade.
Moreover, this port has been planned for well over a decade. Construction started years before Boluarte came to power, and would have been inaugurated regardless of who was president.
The fact of the matter is that the Port of Chancay can economically transform the country. Any Peruvian leader would have tried to take credit for it. Boluarte simply got lucky that it happened when she was able to (undemocratically) seize power.
More deeply, what this situation demonstrates is that, despite the political sympathies of the local comprador ruling elites, the US is losing influence simply because it is not offering anything that will actually benefit Peru’s economy.
Washington expects countries like Peru, and their Westernized ruling classes, to sacrifice their own economic interests on behalf of the United States. Increasingly, however, even pro-US elites are no longer willing to do so, because they have other options.
China’s state-led Belt and Road Initiative vs G7’s BlackRock-funded private infrastructure
China is already the largest trading partner of most countries in South America.
New infrastructure projects in the region like the Port of Chancay will help Asia and Latin America deepen their economic integration, in what Beijing refers to as South-South cooperation.
Bolivia’s President Luis Arce revealed that he spoke with Chinese President Xi on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Brazil in November, and they discussed plans to potentially create an inter-oceanic train connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic, starting from Peru’s Port of Chancay and then crossing through BRICS partners Bolivia and Brazil.
The mega-port is an important part of what China calls the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.
Beijing considers the Port of Chancay to be a “flagship” project in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a decade-long campaign in which China has spent more than $1 trillion building infrastructure around the world.
With the BRI, China has sought to diversify its international economic relations and reduce its reliance on Western markets.
In 2011, the Barack Obama administration announced a “pivot to Asia”, making plans to send more US troops to the Asia-Pacific region to militarily encircle China.
The Donald Trump administration upped the ante by launching an aggressive trade war on China, which was further escalated by Joe Biden.
By building new infrastructure and trade networks in the Global South, China hopes to reduce its dependence on trade with an increasingly hostile United States that seeks to contain it.
The projects in China’s BRI are largely built by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which are not driven by profits, and thus can invest in infrastructure that may not earn much money, but will be strategic. SOEs make up more than one-third of China’s economy.
60% of the Port of Chancay was funded by China’s state-owned firm COSCO Shipping, whereas the other 40% was financed by a private Peruvian mining company.
Meanwhile, as China has become the world leader in constructing high-quality infrastructure, the United States has failed to invest in basic infrastructure at home, where its own bridges are collapsing.
The Biden administration made a last-ditch effort to compete with Beijing by announcing in 2021 a G7 initiative called Build Back Better World (B3W). US state propaganda outlet VOA bluntly described this as Washington’s “counter to China’s Belt and Road”.
To date, however, B3W has accomplished very little. One of the main reasons is that, instead of relying on the state, like China has done in the BRI, the G7 campaign relies on private, for-profit companies.
From the very beginning, the US government made it clear that B3W is a neoliberal campaign based on “public-private partnerships”, in which investment funds on Wall Street will gain returns for their wealthy clients by buying up privatized infrastructure.
The White House press release announcing the initiative stressed that, “Through B3W, the G7 and other like-minded partners will coordinate in mobilizing private-sector capital”; adding that B3W aims “to support and catalyze a significant increase in private capital to address infrastructure needs”, by relying on a “market-driven private sector”.
B3W was later rebranded as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII).
At the G7 summit in Italy in June 2024, the White House announced that BlackRock would help oversee the PGII, by mobilizing “private capital for projects” and using the “private sector” to build infrastructure.
BlackRock is the world’s largest investment company, with $11.5 trillion in assets under management.
The billionaire oligarch chairman and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, spoke as a guest of honor at the G7 summit, where he insisted that “building new infrastructure is critical, especially through public-private partnerships”.
Fink outlined the plans of Wall Street investment firms to enrich their clients by building privatized infrastructure in the Global South, explaining the strategy as he sat at a table alongside the G7 heads of state:
The IMF and the World Bank were created 80 years ago, when banks, not markets, financed most things. Today the financial world has flipped. The capital markets are the biggest source of private sector financing, and unlocking that money requires a different approach than the bank balance sheet model of yesterday.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but reform over the past eight months have resulted in billions of new dollars for developing countries’ infrastructure. That is what you saw last week with the announcement of the investor coalition. BlackRock, GIP [Global Infrastructure Partners], KKR, and other major firms will deploy $25 billion in Asia’s emerging economies.
Eric Arthur Blair
2024-11-25 at 06:51
Officially stated and defacto Chinese foreign policy is:
– mutual respect
– peaceful coexistence
– win-win cooperation
Defacto US foreign policy is:
– me master, you slave
– perpetual war to ensure perpetual US war profiteering
– I-win you-lose / zero sum game / my way or the highway.
Chinese overseas projects:
State managed, using brand new components constructed to high engineering standards, yielding little to no short term profits, but to serve long term foreign infrastructure needs that will facilitate long term win-win trading relationships.
US overseas projects:
Private vulture capital managed, involving “sale” of obsolete 40 year old castoff crap, while imposing extortionate short term price gouging that will maximize immediate profits for US share holders / investors. Long term: trap those dumb foreigners in unserviceable debt slavery which forces them to sell their resources to the USA for peanuts.
Ideal US – Foreign relationship:
USA bombed the Nordstream gas pipeline while Oaf Scholz welcomed being buggered in the arse while grinning like a halfwit and pretending it wuz de Ukies dat dunnit.
USA then “sold”* superexpensive fracked LNG trans-Atlantically to the stupid Germs who were consequently unable to operate their infrastructure or to manufacture products affordably, causing the ever accelerating industrial and economic collapse of the Germs.
(*US LNG cannot be sold to suckers anywhere else in the world because it is way more expensive than any other gas source.)
Meanwhile US passed the “inflation reduction act” to entice Germy corporations to relocate factories to the USA, decimating Germ jobs further.
Why, oh why, does the rest of the world not see the superduper benefits of signing up to team USA?
Everyone should aspire to be like the invertebrate, arse buggered, democratic Germs and resist those damn authoritarian Chinese commies.
Message to Peruvians:
You are stupid to be trapped into a future of peace, progress and prosperity offered by authoritarian China, when the good ole liberty loving USA offers you freedomaceous poverty, deprivation and debt penury in perpetuity. I mean, how dumb can you get?
Eric Arthur Blair
2024-11-25 at 19:28
Here is my comment about John Mearsheimer’s view of the world
https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/25/john-mearsheimer-desperation-time-in-ukraine/
John “Thucydides” Mearsheimer is not antiwar, he is only antiwar against Russia but is very much prowar against China. In that sense he may wallow alongside *ucker Carlson and VD Jance in the Beltway swamp.
What’s the difference? AntiChina hysteria is mainly based on ignorant racist bigotry. However the logical outcome of relentless aggressive US belligerence towards either Russia or China will be the same: nuclear Armageddon and human extinction.
Why the Thucydides trap is wrong:
– The Peloponnesian War ocurred in a specific and limited place and time in history and cannot be extrapolated to everywhere, all the time. It is like saying that I know of one chap named Mearsheimer who is a convicted pedo, therefore all chaps named Mearsheimer must be pedos.
– China stopped being expansionist and imperialist since 221 BCE.
Jeffrey Sachs researched this historically
https://lnns.co/F3PLV4bk2t5 – listen from around 25.5 minutes
– The British Imperialist philosopher, the neoconartist of his time in the 1600s, Francis Bacon, famously wrote that 3 things enabled Britain’s expansionism and global imperialism: printing, the compass and ocean going ships. He omitted to mention that all 3 were invented in China*. As were paper and gunpowder, also essential for western imperialist genocidal expansion.
– Almost a century before Columbus and his pissant 3 ships “discovered” India, China embarked on 7 humungous maritime expeditions commencing in 1405 involving thousands of massive ships and hundreds of thousands of sailors going as far as South Africa. They never bullied anyone using their ships and cannons, although they did protect one Sri Lankan ruler from pirates. After a few decades China voluntarily stopped, destroyed their ships and burned the voyage records and turned inwards, leading to long term weakness. Zero interest in imperial expansion.
– China today has no interest in trapping other countries in debt, which can be negotiable if the debtor has difficulty.
Brief comment from personal experience of economist Yanis Varoufakis here:
https://youtu.be/Wl3wQTVTPVo
Also see this: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/11/21/china-builds-port-peru-us-old-trains/
– The existentially most dangerous confrontation between the two largest Empires in the world ever, the USA and the USSR, ended up NOT with armed conflict as the Thucydides ideologues would have wrongly predicted, but with the peaceful and voluntary self dismantling of the USSR.
Summary: Regarding Russia, Mearsheimer may have some correct ideas, but regarding China he is an ignorant racist bigot and is simply dead wrong and is promoting the prospect of nuclear Armageddon by adopting such an idiotic position.
More nails in the coffin debunking Mearsheimer’s brain dead ideology:
https://youtu.be/8BsAa_94dao?si=ysEP76SpfnmjnEXK
*China invented bulkheads, the stern rudder and the junk rig which could easily be reefed in a storm and was the most efficient rig sailing to windward prior to the invention of the Bermudan rig, and hence could easily outmaneuver any British square riggers.
Eric Arthur Blair
2024-11-30 at 14:07
China Makes Peru the Singapore of South America
https://youtu.be/8TSyF1m871Q?si=dVQke6nKVBy-PYqL
In 1978, when Deng Xiao Peng saw what Lee Kuan Yew had done in Singapore, Deng said he wanted to do the same thing in China, however that would require creating a thousand Singapores.
As of 2024/5, it appears the Chinese have pretty much achieved that goal and are on track to far surpass it.
What is the next diabolical plot that China has in store for the world, especially Asia, Latin America and Africa?
Create a hundred thousand Singapores worldwide (except crumbling USA and Western Europe, who prefer to exclude themselves by their self sabotaging sanctions).
Looks like Ben Norton’s GPE is part of this diabolical plot.
Eric Arthur Blair
2024-11-30 at 14:15
Admit it, Ben!
I have worked out your agenda!