Links for Thursday, October 1, 2020

Notable China news from around the web.

The editors

WORTH THINKING ABOUT

Pieces of news or analysis that caught our eye:

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is “badly mismanaged and visibly failing,” argues Jonathan Hillman in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today. Hillman, director of the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of a new book, The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century, writes:

  • That China will “will likely come to regret making Pakistan, in their words, the ‘flagship’” of the project, because the country has become known as a “black hole of foreign assistance.” (See on The China Project this week — Is China turning Pakistan into a colonial outpost?)
  • “Globally, most large infrastructure projects cost more than expected, take longer than expected and deliver fewer benefits than expected, according to Oxford University researchers.”
  • That the COVID-19 pandemic has raised the likelihood of a large proportion of projects failing, but with the Belt and Road enshrined in the Chinese Communist Party constitution, Beijing is “struggling to cut its losses,” even though it should in many cases.

The case of two Chinese students accused of spying on a navy air station in Florida is told in detail by Eric Fish in this piece in Foreign Policy: Were they lost students or inept spies for China? The details in the piece seem to indicate that they were lost students:

  • Wang Yuhao and Zhang Jielun, two 24-year-old students who made a trip to Florida on Winter Break from their studies at the University of Michigan, now sit in a federal penitentiary awaiting deportation.
  • The naval air station, located on Dredgers Key near Key West, that they were accused of spying on is “directly adjacent to tourist sites,” and the students say that they had initially assumed it was a national park. They are not alone — an air station spokesperson said there were “regular trespassing incidents” at the location.
  • In fact, the same day that Wang and Zhang were arrested, “two other men had illegally come onto Dredgers Key by boat,” but they were simply “escorted off the island.”
  • They are only accused of taking six photos while trespassing, which “could not have contained more than a vague outline of some structures.” The FBI or prosecutors never brought any additional evidence based on searches of their hotel room, apartments, emails, and electronic devices.
  • Fish writes, “if someone had wanted images of the installations Wang and Zhang were charged with photographing, they likely could have gotten far better results through completely legal means, or simply by logging on the Internet.”

However, the judge in their trial, K. Michael Moore, seemed convinced that the appropriate response was to assume the worst of Wang and Zhang’s intentions, and cited their Chinese nationality and the “frequency” of similar cases in Florida as he handed them their sentences: nine months for Wang and 12 months for Zhang, followed by deportation and permanent bans from the United States.

Related, on The China Project: United States Sinophobia Tracker.

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