The Daily View: Pulp fictions
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REPUBLICAN senators may be the ones fixated on China’s nefarious plot to install spy cranes and block the PRC-controlled Panama Canal, but they are by no means alone in worrying about the wilder end of “what if” scenarios being covertly cooked up in Beijing.
The problem is that separating fact from pulp fiction is becoming increasingly difficult as political rhetoric increasingly starts to resemble the plot lines of badly written Cold War thrillers.
America is sleepwalking into a carefully laid Chinese trap that will allow communist shipping companies, and cranes, to sink the US economy via a series of spurious espionage plots and a state-ordered sabotage programme.
That is not the frothing rant of some tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist sat in his parents’ basement, but the output of a US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held this week.
The fact that media coverage now requires a fact-checking section longer than the news to inject some semblance of reality into coverage says a lot about the post-truth political era in which we live. But as the conspiracy theorists never tire of telling you, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
It may have come wrapped in more sober language, but the EU Parliamentary analysis of China’s influence on critical infrastructure in the EU that was published a week in advance of the US Senate hearing voiced many of the same concerns.
It warned that Beijing has built strategic investment in Europe allowing state-level monitoring and control of key logistical nodes. It warns that Europe’s ports are increasingly vulnerable to China’s influence and inadequate screening has exposed “the EU’s vulnerabilities and reaffirmed the need to ‘de-risk’ its relations vis-à-vis the PRC and other undemocratic third countries”.
It also positioned China’s military-civil fusion strategy to gain control of shipping as part of Beijing’s objective of “strengthening the totalitarian regime and achieving military dominance”.
In other words, exactly what the tin-foil hat brigade were warning of in the US.
What all this conveniently overlooks, of course, is the decades-long programme of investment previously willingly accepted from Chinese firms that have astutely acquired a leading commercial position across maritime infrastructure internationally.
That was not achieved covertly or via some dastardly plot, rather it was done willingly with the full support of those Western political institutions now rapidly seeking ways to “de-risk” their economic reliance on China’s maritime dominance.
Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List