Monday, August 22, 2016

Why China's one belt one road plans to go through Singapore ? - Bloomberg

As the son of a man who journeyed from China to Singapore and founded a shipping business a half century ago, Teo Siong Seng sees his life as one immersed in the ancient trading networks of Asia.
So the managing director of the Pacific International Lines Group is seeking to benefit as China rejuvenates its Silk Road routes to the Middle East and Europe. He is setting up a joint venture with China Cosco Shipping Corporation Ltd. to help China’s largest shipping group build connections in Southeast Asia and beyond.
“Chinese companies alone may not have enough experience to carry out their investments in other countries,” said Teo, who’s also chairman of the Singapore Business Federation. “To cooperate with companies like us would also make their businesses smoother. They have to learn the way we deal with local people and the way we do business.”

Teo Siong Seng. rg
  
Photographer: Bryan van der Beek/Bloombe

The venture underscores Singapore’s potential as a gateway to Southeast Asia for China as President Xi Jinping seeks to export excess industrial capacity while building influence overseas. Lured by shared cultural bonds and the former British colony’s legal and financial systems, the number of Chinese companies registered locally has almost doubled in the past five years to more than 7,500

Exploiting Singapore’s regional familiarity could help Chinese companies navigate local politics complicated by tensions over China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. It could also help them avoid pitfalls from prior investment in Africa and Latin America, where China has faced criticism at times for a heavy-handed approach, insisting for example its companies and laborers carry out the bulk of a contract.
“From all the failures, Chinese have learned that they need a local broker,” said Gao Zhikai, a board member of coking coal distributor Winsway Enterprises Holdings and former vice president of crude oil giant CNOOC Ltd. “Chinese companies believe Singapore companies are easier to deal with and they know how to deal with different markets.”
Xi is offering vasts amounts of money to Southeast Asia for infrastructure projects for the maritime portion of his revitalized Silk Road. Combined with an overland route through Eurasia, the project is known as “One Belt, One Road.”
For Beijing, the project is a solution to the industrial overcapacity that has built up in many sectors. It’s also the economic carrot of Xi’s push to make China a regional power and challenge decades of U.S. dominance in Asia. Greater trade and investment could blunt concern over the country’s military expansion and its territorial ambitions.
Investment company Fosun International -- one of the largest private groups in China -- set up its Southeast Asian headquarters in Singapore last year. “Chinese companies have to pick the right platform and springboard before making an international move, and Singapore is a very good choice,” said chief executive officer Liang Xinjun.


China’s relations with Southeast Asia are deeply rooted in history and the region’s trading culture. Some Chinese Singaporeans, like Teo’s father, migrated from Chinese provinces like Fujian during the second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, and ethnic Chinese traders had been plying routes in the area for centuries before.
China has looked to Singapore before: The country in late 2015 hosted the first summit between Taiwan and China in seven decades, while late leader Lee Kuan Yew was seen as a regional voice of counsel on China relations. Many Chinese officials tread a path each year to Singapore to study its political model.
Singapore has the largest ethnic Chinese population in the region, at nearly 75 percent, and is China’s largest foreign investor. More than 20 percent of its gross domestic product is linked to China, according to Natixis SA.
Chinese business flowing through Singapore could help as its economy faces what could be its slowest-growth year since the global financial crisis, hurt by a slowdown in trade, weak commodity prices and job cuts in the banking industry.
Still, while Southeast Asian nations are hungry for infrastructure funds to meet the demands of their growing populations, China shouldn’t expect an unconditional open door.

‘More Cautious’

"Many countries in Southeast Asia are becoming more cautious when dealing with Chinese companies, which have a relatively bad track record in implementing deals over the past decade," said Winsway’s Gao, who is also director of the China National Association of International Studies.
"Given the growing tensions over the South China Sea, Chinese firms have to be even more careful in putting the deals in practice,” Gao said. “Even a small mistake could cause a major negative reaction.”


China may look to Singapore to help smooth over the territorial frictions it has with some Southeast Asian nations. The U.S. navy uses Singapore as a gateway to the South China Sea for its ships and surveillance planes, and Singapore has called on China to tread carefully.

On a company level, there is progress. Singapore’s Ascendas-Singbridge Group created a joint venture last year with China Machinery Engineering Corporation to invest in industrial and technology parks in Asia. Ascendas-Singbridge Chief Customer Solutions Officer Aylwin Tan said the venture expects to announce its first project within six months.
“We find that trust is the most important element in the Chinese business culture,” Tan said by e-mail. “Singaporeans can better appreciate the Chinese culture, and understand the spoken and unspoken rules of doing business in China.”
Still, there will be difficulties ahead, according to Bernard Chan, president of Asia Financial, an investment holding company. Some nations in the region have relatively opaque -- and complex -- regulatory and financial reporting systems that can be harder for outsiders to navigate.
Also, China companies in some cases "have absolutely no clue of what they are buying, but they have to buy," said Chan. "It looks like a recycling of what happened 20 years ago to the Japanese. Hopefully Chinese companies could learn from them and minimize the mistakes. But I’m sure they will walk through that cycle once again."
— With assistance by Keith Zhai, and David Roman

Trump could be right about US exceptionalism - New York Magazine

It is possible to agree some things Donald Trump has said and think that he is an authoritarian demagogue who represents the worst of our nation’s impulses. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible for anyone not to agree with something Trump has said — the GOP nominee has been on both sides of nearly every major issue in American politics (and quite a few minor ones). Everyone from Noam Chomsky to Dick Cheney can find something worth seconding in Trump’s back catalogue of political musings.
This point might seem obvious to you. If so, then you are not Daily Beast columnist Jamie Kirchick.
On Monday, Kirchick wrote a piece titled “Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left.” In the column, Kirchick observes that Donald Trump once said that he was uncomfortable with the idea of American exceptionalism — and (gasp) many left-wing thinkers agree! Thus, Kirchick reasons, all left-wing critics of American foreign policy must be “Trump fans” who are recklessly “validating” a “reactionary.” That may sound like a caricature of his argument, but the cartoonishness is Kirchick’s own. After (justifiably) mocking leftists who believe Trump’s election might usefully “heighten the contradictions,” Kirchick writes:
But it is the second group of progressive Trump fans, subtler in their sympathies, who warrant the most concern. These are the so-called anti-imperialists who harbor deep revulsion at the idea of American power being used for good in the world. America, they believe, is more often than not a source of evil and disorder—a jaundiced view of our global role that they share with the Republican nominee …

“Trump is right, we are flawed messengers,” declared radical left-wing Brooklyn College political science professor Corey Robin in reaction to Trump’s Times interview. As evidence, Robin cited a United Nations hearing on American police brutality, where delegates from human rights luminaries like Pakistan, Russia, China, and Turkey denounced Uncle Sam. “No matter the DC freakout over Trump NYT interview, think his tacit repudiation of US exceptionalism is praiseworthy,” echoed Washington Post blogger Ishaan Tharoor … 

… Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” Trump declared in his first foreign policy address back in April. 

Such words are music to the ears of those on the left who paint Hillary Clinton as a “warmonger” for her mainstream foreign policy views and traditional support for the American-led liberal world order. 

The only alternative to Trump’s frothy isolationism is Clinton’s liberal hawkishness,” sighs The New Republic’s Jeet Heer. Writing for The Electronic Intifada, whose worldview is exactly what it sounds like, Rania Khalek concludes that “Clinton is also dangerous to world stability. And unlike Trump, she has the blood on her hands to prove it.” Though Khalek admits that “Trump is riling up fascist sentiments,” she says that “he’s doing so by tapping into legitimate anger at the negative consequences of trickle-down neoliberal economics driven by establishment politicians likeClinton.”
It’s worth noting that all of the thinkers Kirchick cites in these passages have publicly denounced Trump, and many have indicated a preference to see Hillary Clinton elected in November. It’s also worth noting that Kirchick has expressed public opposition to the Iran deal during this campaign cycle — a jaundiced view of American diplomacy that he shares with the Republican nominee. In fact, the foreign-policy speech Trump delivered on Monday was far more consistent with Kirchick’s stated views than with those of the left-wingers he casts as closet Trumpists. Does the fact that Kirchick agrees with Trump that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq was a disastrous mistake mean that Kirchick is a Trump “admirer”? What about the fact that he, like Trump, is a raging hypocrite?