"China gains influence with development push into Cambodia" by John Pomfret, Washington Post / December 5, 2010
KOH KONG, Cambodia —Here in the depths of the Cardamom Mountains, where the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge communists made their last stand in the late 1970s, China is asserting its rights as a resurgent imperial power in Asia. Instead of exporting revolution and bloodshed to its neighbors, China is now sending its cash and its people.
At this clangorous hydropower dam site hard along Cambodia’s border with Thailand, and in Myanmar, Laos, and even Vietnam, China is engaged in a massive push to extend its economic and political influence into Southeast Asia. Spreading investment and aid along with political pressure, China is transforming a huge swath of territory along its southern border. Call it the Monroe Doctrine, Chinese-style.
Ignored by successive US administrations, China’s rise in this region is now causing alarm in Washington, which is aggressively courting the countries of Southeast Asia.
Have they invaded anyone over lies yet?
The Obama administration has cultivated closer ties with its old foe Vietnam.
See: Hillary Clinton Spoils Hanoi Celebration
It has tried to open doors to Myanmar, which US officials believe is in danger of becoming a Chinese vassal state.
Also see: Obama's Burmese Thaw
Relations have been renewed with Laos, whose northern half is dominated by Chinese businesses.
Related: US Two-Faced Towards China
In an Oct. 28 speech about US policy in Asia, before embarking on her sixth trip to the continent in two years, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used military terminology to refer to US efforts....
During a recent trip to Phnom Penh — the first by a US secretary of state since 2002 — Clinton, while speaking to Cambodian students, was asked about Cambodia’s ties to Beijing. “You don’t want to get too dependent on any one country,’’ she told them.
Has she told that to Israel?
Still, China powers ahead.
You ready for another world war, America? Prepared to play the loser this time (even after exhausting the nuclear arsenal)?
China has concluded a free-trade deal with all 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, while a similar US pact is only in its infancy.
Yeah, it is OKAY if WE DO FREE TRADE DEALS!
It is cementing ties with Thailand, a US ally, despite recent political unrest there.
Yeah, and if you scroll my Thailand files you will pretty quickly see the Red Shirts were working for the CIA. Now you know the motivation behind the attempted coup.
In Cambodia, Chinese firms have turned mining and agricultural concessions in the eastern part of the country into no-go zones for Cambodian police. Guards at the gates to two of them, a gold mine and a hemp plantation, shoo travelers away unless they are able to pay a toll.
“It’s like a country within a country,’’ Cambodia’s minister of the interior, Sar Kheng, quipped at a conference this year.
China’s real estate development firms have barged into Cambodia with all the ambition, obtrusiveness, and verve that American fruit and tire firms employed in Latin America or Africa in decades past....
Except the CHINESE are NOT MURDERING PEOPLE like AmeriKa has done. And they are using the bulldozers to build, not demolish like the Israelis.
I suppose I should be happy with the allusion to past AmeriKan crimes of empire, right?
Chinese work teams are cutting a road and mapping hotels, villas, and golf courses.
Have they dropped any bombs yet?
The estimated investment? $3.8 billion.
About what we give Israel in aid each year.
The target market? The nouveau riche from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.
In October, China pledged to support the construction of a $600 million railway between Phnom Penh and Vietnam that will bring China a major step closer to incorporating all of Southeast Asia, as far south as Singapore, into its rail network.
Across Cambodia, dozens of state-run Chinese companies are building eight hydropower dams. The total price tag for those dams will exceed $1 billion. Altogether, Cambodia owes China $4 billion, said Cheam Yeap, a member of the central committee of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.
“This takeover is inevitable,’’ said Lak Chee Meng, a reporter on the Cambodia Sin Chew Daily, one of the country’s four Chinese-language dailies, serving 300,000 Khmer-Chinese and an additional quarter-million immigrants and businessmen from mainland China. “Cambodia is approaching China with open arms. It’s how the United States took over its neighborhood.’’
What did you say there?
Truth is we took ours over with trained killers for years down below -- in many of the countries on the map (if not every one). Such are the burdens of empire.
************
Cambodia so strictly follows Beijing’s “one China’’ policy that it has refused Taiwan’s request to open up an economic office here despite the many millions of dollars’ worth of Taiwanese investment in Cambodia.
I don't see why that should be a big deal:
"Taiwan's rapidly improving ties with longtime foe China are diminishing US influence"
So WHO BENEFITS from CONFLICT in the PACIFIC REGION, readers?
Which empire is LOSING ITS POWER?!!
--more--"
Also see: Panic at Cambodia fest kills 349
Survivors describe panicked crowd on Cambodian bridge
Bridge collapse fear sparked stampede
Speaking of collapses:
51 are killed as four-story building collapses in New Delhi
New Delhi evacuates more housing
Blaze in high-rise apartments leaves 53 dead in Shanghai
What do you mean it didn't fall into its own footprint in a heap?
Building disasters linked to Asia’s fast-growing economies
Not terrorists?
China officials order stricter fire controls after Shanghai blaze
Yeah, there was no screaming about building codes over here after 9/11 -- as if people in the know knew it wasn't structural failure.
Police are sent in as tens of thousands mourn at site of China fire that killed 58
Chinese activist jailed over tainted-milk protest seeks parole
Vatican denounces China over ordination
The Vatican has some nerve denouncing anyone -- and I'm Catholic!
"Bishops seek end to Israeli ‘occupation’
Bishops from the Middle East summoned to Rome by the pope demanded yesterday that Israel accept UN resolutions calling for an end to its “occupation’’ of Arab lands. The bishops also told Israel it shouldn’t use the Bible to justify “injustices.’’ (AP)."
Doesn't mean they are not right, but....
Of course, that is why the Catholic church is savaged in the Zionist-controlled newspapers. Still a hell of a lot of us out there.
Chinese train hits 302 m.p.h., breaks record
And I'm moving like a bat out of hell away from the BG.
Bishops from the Middle East summoned to Rome by the pope demanded yesterday that Israel accept UN resolutions calling for an end to its “occupation’’ of Arab lands. The bishops also told Israel it shouldn’t use the Bible to justify “injustices.’’ (AP)."
Doesn't mean they are not right, but....
Of course, that is why the Catholic church is savaged in the Zionist-controlled newspapers. Still a hell of a lot of us out there.
Chinese train hits 302 m.p.h., breaks record
And I'm moving like a bat out of hell away from the BG.
