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China lands a win win with Belt and Road?
[ATimes] The pieces in Beijing’s massive puzzle are starting to come together..Relentless reports that the New Silk Roads, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), are a perfidious neo-imperial debt trap set up by Yellow Peril 2.0 are vastly exaggerated. With less than one week to go before the next BRI forum in Beijing, a quick overview of what’s been happening in Europe and Southwest Asia may be quite enlightening. Immediately after a successful 21st China-EU summit in Brussels, the 8th China-16+1 meeting in Dubrovnik focused on Central and Eastern Europe nations, ending up like a 17+1 – Greece is their newest member. So now we have 12 EU member states plus five Balkan nations committed to the BRI and wider business deals with Beijing. The joint commitments of 17+1 are a “win-win” prodigy in itself. The Europeans exhort China to implement a real “level playing field,” and everyone enthusiastically supports the EU-China Comprehensive Investment Agreement, which Brussels and Beijing had already pledged to sign before the end of 2020. Apart from forcefully investing in a détente with Brussels, Beijing, of course, keeps its own priorities. They focus especially on Greece and Croatia, while the courting of Italy after the signing of the BRI memorandum will also proceed unabated. From the Baltics to the Mediterranean – specifically from Estonia to Greece – China seems to be configuring a new booming trade Intermarium, a mirror image of the combative anti-Russia Intermarium from the Baltics to the Black Sea that obsesses NATO. Posted by: 3dc 2019-04-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=539193 |