Chinese Dream 中国梦

39 people found dead in Essex lorry were all Chinese

https://www.aljazeera.com
Thirty-nine people were found dead inside the truck container on Wednesday.

The 39 people found dead in a trailer shipped from Belgium to Britain are all believed to be Chinese nationals, British police said.
"We have since confirmed that eight of the deceased are women and 31 are men and all are believed to be Chinese nationals," police said in a statement on Thursday.
The Chinese foreign ministry said it was trying to confirm the report, according to the Global Times.
The paper, published by the official People's Daily newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, said the foreign ministry said "nothing more could be released as of now".
Paramedics and police found the bodies early on Wednesday in a truck container on an industrial estate at Grays, about 20 miles (32 km) east of the British capital, London.
Belgian prosecutors confirmed the container was shipped from the port of Zeebrugge on Tuesday.
The tragedy recalls the deaths of 58 migrants in 2000 in a truck in Dover, England who had undertaken a perilous, months-long journey from China's southern Fujian province. 

They were discovered stowed away with a cargo of tomatoes after a ferry ride from Zeebrugge.
Essex Police were questioning a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland over the latest tragedy.
He was arrested on suspicion of murder, the police said, adding that raids had been carried out at three properties in Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland police searched the properties in the Northern Irish village of Laurelvale, County Armagh late on Wednesday, where the driver and his family lived, according to the Belfast Telegraph.
The vehicle has been moved to a secure site at nearby Tilbury Docks where the bodies can be recovered and further forensic work undertaken to begin what police said would be the lengthy process of identifying the victims.
The National Crime Agency said it was assisting the investigation and working to "urgently identify and take action against any organised crime groups who have played a role in causing these deaths".
Shaun Sawyer, the national spokesman for British police on human trafficking, said many thousands of people were seeking to come to the United Kingdom. 

While they were able to rescue many of those smuggled into the country, Britain was perceived by organised crime as a potentially easy target for traffickers.
"You can't turn the United Kingdom into a fortress. We have to accept that we have permeable borders," he told BBC radio.

Chinese Colonialism

China Is Doing The Same Things To Sri Lanka Great Britain Did To China After The Opium Wars
By Panos Mourdoukoutas 

China is turning Sri Lanka into a modern day “semi-colony,” the same way Great Britain and Portugal turned south China into their own semi-colonies back in the mid of 19th century.
Sri Lanka didn’t lose a war to China. 

It never ceded any of its territory officially to China. 

But it handed over economic control of its deep sea Hambantota port to China Merchants Port Holdings (CM Port).
Last week, CM Port made a $584 million payment as part of a $1.12 billion deal to operate Sri Lanka’s deep-sea Hambantota port, according to a Reuters report. 

Under the agreement, signed in July 2017, CM Port will run the $1.5 billion Chinese-built port on a 99-year lease.
The $1.12 billion total price is to be used to reduce the Sri Lankan government’s debt to China.
In economic terms, this agreement is similar to that China signed back in the aftermath of Opium Wars with the British and the Portuguese, ceding control of its Southern ports to the British and the Portuguese.
China's growing presence in Sri Lanka began back in 2007, when Beijing provided President Rajapaksa both military and diplomatic support to crush the Tamil Tigers. 

Then followed high profile construction projects and high interest loans that left Sri Lanka heavily indebted to China.
Sri Lanka government debt was standing 77.60% of the country's GDP in 2017, well above the 69.69% average for the 1950-2017 period, according to Tradingeconomics.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s Government Budget deficit stands at 5.5% of the country’s GDP, adding to its indebtedness.
Rising indebtedness comes at a time when Sri Lanka is already living beyond its means, as evidenced by persistent current account deficits, which stand at 2.60% of the country's GDP in 2017.
To cope with a rising debt to China, Sri Lanka has signed agreements with China that swap loans for equity, transforming China into an owner to major infrastructure projects like Sri Lanka’s major port— and a key outpost in the Indian Ocean for Beijing.
This development has irked India, which is slowly becoming encircled by China; and India’s allies that are concerned about China’s aggressive moves to control maritime trade from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.
That’s something investors in Southeast Asian markets should keep a wary eye on, as it opens yet another front between the two Asian giants, raising the geopolitical risk of investing in the region.
Markets, for the time being, seem to be ignoring these risks.

Sina Delenda Est

Is Great Britain Preparing for a War with China?
By Michael Peck

The Pacific Ocean does not exactly bubble with happy memories for Britain. 

In December 1941, Japanese torpedo bombers sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off Malaya. 

In early 1942, the Japanese captured eighty thousand British soldiers at Singapore.
Already overstretched fighting the Nazis in Europe, Britain couldn’t do much in the Far East during World War II. 

For almost a century, America has been the big stick in the Pacific.
So why is Britain vowing to send its military muscle to the Pacific?
Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the United States, recently told a Washington think tank that Britain will send aircraft carriers to the Pacific once they become operational in the 2020s. 

Four Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters, which arrived in Japan in October for joint exercises, are scheduled to fly over the South China Sea.
“Certainly, as we bring our two new aircraft carriers onstream in 2020, and as we renew and update our defense forces, they will be seen in the Pacific,” Darroch announced. 

“And we absolutely share the objective of this U.S. administration, and the next one, to protect freedom of navigation and to keep sea routes and air routes open.”
Naturally, Beijing warned that these moves could threaten relations between China and Britain.
There are two questions here. 

The first is technical: What exactly does Britain think it can accomplish militarily against China? 

The Royal Navy is now down to just nineteen destroyers and frigates, and is phasing out its antiship missiles, leaving British warships to slug it out with cannon like the Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916. 

The Royal Air Force is shrinking, and the British Army has fewer infantrymen than were killed on the first day of the Somme in 1916.
Compare this to China, whose defense spending has surged 12.9 percent per year between 1989 and 2011. 

Even with the Chinese economy slowing, the defense budget was still expected to increase by 7.9 percent in 2016.
Assuming the Queen Elizabeth–class carriers and their F-35B aircraft are ready by 2020—two big ifs, given the history of these two programs—then each carrier will accommodate perhaps fifty aircraft at most, including F-35B vertical/short takeoff and landing strike fighters, as well as assorted airborne early-warning and antisubmarine aircraft and helicopters.
If the Americans, with their bigger carriers and sophisticated Aegis-equipped escorts, are worried about Chinese submarines, hypersonic weapons and carrier-killer ballistic missiles, how would a British carrier task force fare? 

If a time warp could take a Queen Elizabeth battlegroup back to 1982, it could possibly take on the entire Argentine air force and navy. 

But China in 2020? 

Not likely.
Which in turn brings up the question of what Britain hopes to accomplish. 

As a means of asserting British influence in East Asia, the British military presence probably won’t help much unless London is prepared to somehow wield a bigger stick (nuclear weapons don’t count—China has them too). 

As deterrence against a Chinese attack on Taiwan or Japan, if Beijing isn’t afraid of the United States, then it’s not likely to be afraid of Britain.
Militarily, despite some claims that Britain could defeat China under some conditions, this seems a risky proposition at best. 

With Chinese GDP almost five times greater than Britain’s, it is a proposition that will only get riskier. 

In the high-tech arms race between America and China, Britain simply doesn’t have the resources to compete.
Nor should it. 

Regardless of what China does, there is still the emerging Russian threat in Europe. 

Wouldn’t it make sense to concentrate the Royal Navy in Europe and the Mediterranean, as in World War II, and let the United States worry about the Pacific?