One irony of the U.S.-led opposition to the Belt and Road Initiative is that the limited European capacity to receive U.S. LNG today is due to that opposition, economist Michele Geraci wrote in an op-ed in China Daily April 20. “One of the main problems Italy faces now when trying to diversify its supply chain of gas is the limited port capacity, which is not enough to receive alternative supplies from large tankers arriving from gas-producing countries, such as the United States,” Geraci wrote. “Had we continued at the same speed with the development of joint Italian-Chinese port projects under the Belt and Road Initiative framework, today, we would be in a much better position to receive those shipments that would have benefited not only our own economy but even that of the US, which was critical of the Belt and Road Initiative. Today, they cannot fully exploit their competitive advantage in the energy sector exactly because of our limited port capacity.”
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202204/20/WS625f6f66a310fd2b29e580cf.html
Geraci’s article, entitled “When Goods Cross Borders,” is otherwise dedicated to the broader subject of the BRI as an alternative to war. “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will,” he added on FB.
The current geopolitical crisis proves how right the Italian government was when, thanks to Geraci’s initiative, it joined the BRI in 2019. The BRI is aimed at bridging the “philosophical decoupling” that has gone on for years between the West and China. “I see this decoupling,” Geraci wrote, “being driven by two different approaches: China tends to worry mostly about its own internal affairs and not to interfere with the internal affairs of other sovereign states and has no intention to export its own social and economic model; while the West tends to take a more proactive role in its attempt to export its social and economic model to other parts of the world.
“The West holds the view that economic development must be accompanied by an opening-up of the political system and perceives elections as being synonymous with democracy, while China’s economic performance indicates that economic and political paths do not need to converge and that democracy is not to be measured simply, as the West believes, only by the electoral process. Rather, it should be measured by the results that the government offers to its citizens. The recent white paper on democracy released by the Chinese government lays emphasis on the difference between process-oriented and result-oriented democracies.
“... The Belt and Road Initiative is related to larger infrastructure projects. Ironically, one of the criticisms we received when Italy joined the initiative was that Chinese companies could do some predatory acquisition of our strategic infrastructure, such as ports. Those who were responsible for the MOU knew from the outset that we did need to evaluate both the risks and opportunities, but we also realized that beyond the political rhetoric, almost all other European ports have Chinese involvement at different levels and at varying degrees, either via ownership such as in the Greek Port of Piraeus or via an operational concession such as in the Port of Rotterdam, hence the risk of Italy being singled out as the only country with a number of ports having a Chinese presence was zero.”
