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.

In his article in the March 7 Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-­Pritchard, the avowed British Secret Intelligence Service (MI­6) stringer for British intelligence notorious for his role in orchestrating the slander operation against President Bill Clinton, proclaimed today that, in his view, the destabilization of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has entered a final phase, and its aim is to break up the BRICS alliance as a whole.

Under the headline “Downfall of Brazil’s Lula Marks End of BRICS Fantasy,” Evans-­Pritchard manically trumpets that “Brazil is the first of the BRICS quintet to break down on so many fronts at once, but Russia and South Africa are both in deep crisis, and China is running through $100 bn. of foreign reserves a month. Only India has the wind in its sails. The BRICS concept has become meaningless.” With last Friday’s grandstand arrest of President Rousseff’s close ally, former President Lula da Silva, Evans­-Pritchard pontificated, “the drive to impeach Mrs. Rousseff suddenly looks unstoppable.” He adds that the “markets” are hoping that current Vice President Michel Temer will take over, “grasping the nettles of austerity and reform at the head of a pro­-market government.”

Notably, Evans-­Pritchard has been deployed personally into Sao Paulo, from where he has been writing prolifically since the beginning of March. In a March 3 Telegraph column, he insisted that Brazil “is heading straight into the arms of the International Monetary Fund. The sooner this grim reality is recognized by the country’s leaders, the safer it will be for the world.”

Simultaneously, the British Crown has activated Marina Silva in the drive to bring down the Rousseff government. Silva is a wholly ­owned “green” asset of the British royal family, who in 2008 received from Royal Consort Prince Philip himself, founder of the murderous World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the `Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Award’ for her environmental achievements. Silva came in third in the first round of the 2014 presidential elections, but she only became a presidential candidate after her running mate (she was a vice presidential candidate), Eduardo Campos, died in a suspicious plane crash three months before the election.

In remarks reported by Folha de Sao Paulo March 6, Silva not only backed the arrest of Lula da Silva, but demanded that Rousseff and her Vice President be removed from office, not simply by impeachment but by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), as this, she said, would overturn the results of the October 2014 election won by Rousseff, thus “correcting an involuntary mistake” by the Brazilian people, and leading to new presidential elections.