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Feb. 22, 2021
In 2015, Shandong Landbridge, owned by Chinese billionaire Ye Cheng, won a 99-year lease to Australia’s Port Darwin when it was privatized, after offering $400 million dollars – 25 times its annual profits. Shortly after the deal was announced, the U.S. government expressed concern that “port access could facilitate intelligence collection on U.S. and Australian military forces stationed nearby.” Indeed, the U.S. Navy uses the port. Sound familiar?
That same year, the Chinese firm SIPG won Israel’s tender to operate the private bay port adjacent to Haifa Port. Here, too the U.S. (belatedly) claimed the move was nothing but another stage of China’s imperialist “One Belt, One Road” plan, whose main goal is Chinese control of foreign infrastructure facilities as a strategic economic lever. The Americans pressured the Israelis, too, to limit Chinese holdings in its infrastructure, and, in vain, to cancel the tender. However, the similarity ends her