Category: Aggregated

Speaking at a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress, Xu Shaoshi, the chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said that the idea of industrial capacity cooperation would be a “springboard” for the Belt and Road Initiative, involving 65 countries.

“The Belt and Road Initiative is very important,” Xu said, in reply to a reporter’s question. “It involves both bilateral and multilateral agreements. The planning and designing of the initiative was issued last year, and different localities have since issued their own programs. It involves 65 countries, most of whom are in the process of industrialization and urbanization, and therefore the Belt and Road appeals to their interests. In addition, thirty countries have signed a memorandum on co-­building the Belt and Road,” Xu said.

“We are working on different corridors and these are now being contracted and the projects are moving forward quickly.” Most advanced, he noted, was the corridor going through Kazakhstan with $13 billion of investment, but also the Pakistan corridor which will be the subject of a $30 billion investment.

Xu said, “We will further improve our cooperation with a number of countries in capacity sharing. We will export our manufacturing of equipment, for instance, in railway production. It will be an import springboard for these countries in their collaboration with the Belt and Road. We have such agreements in our cooperation in building the railroad through Laos and Thailand, a railroad to Moscow, the inter-hemispheric railroad with Peru and the Western expressway in the United States.” Further, “It also characterizes our agreement to build the nuclear power plant[s] in Great Britain and in Pakistan. The overseas investment is promoting our export of equipment, which is up 37%. In 2016 we will be working further with these countries which have already a certain momentum with us, and we will give out specifics on these. And production capacity cooperation will become more prominent and receive more financial support.”

In a March 2 press conference in La Paz, Bolivia’s Minister to the Presidency, Juan Ramon Quintana, warned of a destabilization campaign against President Evo Morales whose aim is to sabotage his government’s alliance with BRICS members China and Russia.

Quintana noted that the Feb. 21 referendum in which Morales was defeated in his bid to run for re­election in 2019, was followed by an attempt to implicate the President in an alleged influence­ peddling scandal ­­clearly an intelligence operation ­­ involving a former lover and the Chinese engineering firm CAMC. Behind this, Quintana charged, is an effort to “weaken the economic integration that Bolivia has achieved with China through projects in the areas of hydrocarbons, physical infrastructure and technological development, among others,” www.laprensa.com reported. “There is a geopolitical and strategic interest aimed at reducing the intensity of Bolivia’s relationship with China and Russia, and the projects we are developing to create a strong state in the country.”

Exemplary of the alliances of which Quintana spoke was the agreement signed March 6 in La Paz between Energy Minister Luis Alberto Sanchez and Sergey Kiriyenko, director ­general of Russia’s atomic energy agency Rosatom to jointly build a state­-of-­the-­art Nuclear Technology Research and Development Center over the next four years, El Deber reported March 6. Present at the signing, President Morales underscored Bolivia’s right to develop nuclear technology, and said that the new center will be the largest and most modern such center in South America.

“Now we are able to deliver major cooperative projects, in this case with Russia as well as with China, and Europe sometimes. How nice that some partners come here with investment and cooperation ­­not just aggression and provocation,” Morales said, according to Channel News Asia. Kirenyenko reported that Argentina could also play a role in the development of the new center, given its expertise in the nuclear field, and said that part of his delegation would be traveling to Buenos Aires from La Paz to meet with relevant nuclear officials there.