China ready to sign friendship treaties with neighbours: Xi Jinping

[bemildred]

Signalling China's readiness to sign friendship treaties with neighbouring countries to build trust, President Xi Jinping on Saturday unveiled an action plan to implement the grandiose 'Silk Road' infrastructure projects under a USD 40 billion special fund.

"Treaties of friendship have been signed by China with eight neighbouring countries. China stands ready to sign such a treaty with all its neighbours and to provide strong support for bilateral relations as well as prosperity and stability in the region," he said while addressing the China-sponsored Boao Forum for Asia annual conference held in the country's southern island of Hainan.

Referring to an old Chinese proverb - "Close neighbours are better than distant relatives" - Xi said the oceans of Asia should be turned into seas of peace and called for a common, comprehensive, sustainable and a cooperative security for Asia. About 15 world leaders, including Nepal President Ram Baran Yadav and Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena attended the meeting.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tata Group Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata along with 1,800 officials and business leaders from abroad also attended. There is no official representation from India, though Supreme Court judge, Justice Jagdhish Singh Khehar attended the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Justices Forum being held on the sidelines of the Boao Forum.

http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-china-ready-to-sign-friendship-treaties-with-neighbours-xi-jinping-2072644

[djean111]

1. How about their treatment of Tibet? Not too "friendly" there.

[bemildred]

2. Well, on the one hand it's bullshit.

On the other hand it's interesting that they want to talk nice, and tells you that they don't think they can just bully people into cooperation with their Silk Road project and other parts of their "influence offensive", if I can coin a term.

[KoKo]

3. New Silk Roads and the Chinese Vision of a Brave New (Trade) World

Year of the Sheep, Century of the Dragon? New Silk Roads and the Chinese Vision of a Brave New (Trade) World
By Pepe Escobar

BEIJING -- Seen from the Chinese capital as the Year of the Sheep starts, the malaise affecting the West seems like a mirage in a galaxy far, far away. On the other hand, the China that surrounds you looks all too solid and nothing like the embattled nation you hear about in the Western media, with its falling industrial figures, its real estate bubble, and its looming environmental disasters. Prophecies of doom notwithstanding, as the dogs of austerity and war bark madly in the distance, the Chinese caravan passes by in what President Xi Jinping calls “new normal” mode.

“Slower” economic activity still means a staggeringly impressive annual growth rate of 7% in what is now the globe’s leading economy. Internally, an immensely complex economic restructuring is underway as consumption overtakes investment as the main driver of economic development. At 46.7% of the gross domestic product (GDP), the service economy has pulled ahead of manufacturing, which stands at 44%.

Geopolitically, Russia, India, and China have just sent a powerful message westward: they are busy fine-tuning a complex trilateral strategy for setting up a network of economic corridors the Chinese call “new silk roads” across Eurasia. Beijing is also organizing a maritime version of the same, modeled on the feats of Admiral Zheng He who, in the Ming dynasty, sailed the “western seas” seven times, commanding fleets of more than 200 vessels.

Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing are at work planning a new high-speed rail remix of the fabled Trans-Siberian Railroad. And Beijing is committed to translating its growing strategic partnership with Russia into crucial financial and economic help, if a sanctions-besieged Moscow, facing a disastrous oil price war, asks for it.

To China’s south, Afghanistan, despite the 13-year American war still being fought there, is fast moving into its economic orbit, while a planned China-Myanmar oil pipeline is seen as a game-changing reconfiguration of the flow of Eurasian energy across what I’ve long called Pipelineistan.

And this is just part of the frenetic action shaping what the Beijing leadership defines as the New Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road of the twenty-first century. We’re talking about a vision of creating a potentially mind-boggling infrastructure, much of it from scratch, that will connect China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Such a development will include projects that range from upgrading the ancient silk road via Central Asia to developing a Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor; a China-Pakistan corridor through Kashmir; and a new maritime silk road that will extend from southern China all the way, in reverse Marco Polo fashion, to Venice.

Continued..........

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175959/

[KoKo]

4. The Great Game in Afghanistan (Twenty-First-Century Update) ---& the China Advantage

The Great Game in Afghanistan (Twenty-First-Century Update)
And the U.S. Is Losing Out
By Dilip Hiro • March 31, 2015 • 2,600 Words

Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own. He seems to be in the process of trying to sideline the country’s major patron of the last 13 years — and as happened in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation there, Chinese resource companies are again picking up the pieces.

In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was the focus of “the Great Game” between the imperial powers of that era, Britain and Czarist Russia, and so it is again. Washington, the planet’s “sole superpower,” having spent an estimated $1 trillion and sacrificed the lives of 2,150 soldiers fighting the Taliban in the longest overseas war in its history, finds itself increasingly and embarrassingly consigned to observer status in the region, even while its soldiers and contractors still occupy Afghan bases, train Afghan forces, and organize night raids against the Taliban.

In the new foreign policy that Ghani recently outlined, the United States finds itself consigned to the third of the five circles of importance. The first circle contains neighboring countries, including China with its common border with Afghanistan, and the second is restricted to the countries of the Islamic world.

In the new politics of Afghanistan under Ghani, as the chances for peace talks between his government and the unbeaten Taliban brighten, the Obama administration finds itself gradually but unmistakably being reduced to the status of bystander. Meanwhile, credit for those potential peace talks goes to the Chinese leadership, which has received a Taliban delegation in Beijing twice in recent months, and to Ghani, who has dulled the hostility of the rabidly anti-Indian Taliban by reversing the pro-India, anti-Pakistan policies of his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.

How to Influence Afghans

Within a month of taking office in late September, Ghani flew not to Washington — he made his obligatory trip there only last week — but to Beijing. There he declared China “a strategic partner in the short term, medium term, long term, and very long term.” In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping called his Afghan counterpart “an old friend of the Chinese people,” whom he hailed for being prepared to work toward “a new era of cooperation” and for planning to take economic development “to a new depth.”

Long Read---Interesting Point of View at:

http://www.unz.com/article/the-great-game-in-afghanistan-twenty-first-century-update/

[bemildred]

5. Interesting, thanks. nt