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What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

nytimes.com

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Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#81

Post by mastazi »

princeb wrote: post #10

A number of Chinese businesses are setting up 100%-Chinese factory compounds overseas. These compounds are located in a foreign country, but they are fully financed by Chinese, built by Chinese, employ only Chinese, have accommodation for the Chinese employees, have a completely sustaining internal economy where employees can buy food and entertainment and send mail, posts, banking, remittance, insurance, through Chi…

This is not a recent phenomenon. The Italian city of Prato has had that type of businesses for at least 20 years now, this is common knowledge in Italy (I grew up there) and I could also find a NYT article about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/world/europe/13prato.html

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#82

Post by mastazi »

fludlight wrote: post #45
princeb wrote: post #10

A number of Chinese businesses are setting up 100%-Chinese factory compounds overseas. These compounds are located in a foreign country, but they are fully financed by Chinese, built by Chinese, employ only Chinese, have accommodation for the Chinese employees, have a completely sustaining internal economy where employees can buy food and entertainment and send mail, posts, banking, remittance, insurance, through Chi…

This strategy is just as transparent as it sounds. Eventually US/EU regulators will find out and shut it down. A similar thing recently played out when a Chinese company owned by the son of a major Chinese aluminum smelting magnate tried to cross ship about a ridiculous quantity of aluminum through Mexico. In this case, certain rules may need to be amended, but that is not outside the realm of possibility. > But conc…

> Eventually US/EU regulators will find out and shut it down.

As I said in another comment in this thread, in the EU (e.g. Prato in Italy) there are examples of this strategy that date back to the 80's, so I wouldn't be so sure about the willingness of the EU regulators to shut them down.

Some background info here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/world/europe/13prato.html

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#83

Post by mattmanser »

factsaresacred wrote: post #77
fludlight wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strategy is just as transparent as it sounds. Eventually US/EU regulators will find out and shut it down. A similar thing recently played out when a Chinese company owned by the son of a major Chinese aluminum smelting magnate tried to cross ship about a ridiculous quantity of aluminum through Mexico. In this case, certain rules may need to be amended, but that is not outside the realm of possibility. > But conc…

> executives voluntarily transferred that to the (then) third world in order to maximize short term profits They gave China their secret sauce (well, actually, China demanded it as a prerequisite) in return for access to one billion new customers. China then cloned the tech and under-priced the foreign competition. See: High-speed rail, wind-turbines etc. Can't say if it was the 'right' thing to do for Western compan…

Those billion consumers had no money to buy anything. They gave away their secret sauce for cheap workers and bad ('good') labor laws, and lost all internal expertise, had their products cloned.

The Chinese market started becoming a thing a decade or two after Made in China became a thing.

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#84

Post by mastazi »

SCdF wrote: post #74
princeb wrote: post #10

A number of Chinese businesses are setting up 100%-Chinese factory compounds overseas. These compounds are located in a foreign country, but they are fully financed by Chinese, built by Chinese, employ only Chinese, have accommodation for the Chinese employees, have a completely sustaining internal economy where employees can buy food and entertainment and send mail, posts, banking, remittance, insurance, through Chi…

Do you have an example of one of these compounds? An article about them?

I have one about Italy http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/world/europe/13prato.html

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#85

Post by Boothroid »

nostrademons wrote: post #44
tuna-piano wrote: post #9

I assume another close contender is the Nay Pyi Taw airport in Myanmar. https://www.instagram.com/p/BXvqis0htxH/?taken-at=277450644 https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/277450644/naypyi... The city was built as a showcase capital for Myanmar's military government, and has crazy sights like a 20 lane highway (with almost no cars): https://www.go-myanmar.com/sites/go-myanmar.com/files/upload... More pictures: ht…

It's interesting to contrast that with the story of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner Mongolia: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/06/30/ordos-ch... I'd first heard of that a couple years ago and shook my head at all the wasteful misallocation of capital. Ordos recently appeared in the news again, but instead of an empty ghost town - it's apparently a thriving metropolis, center of the worldwide Bitcoin mining indust…

This sounds a little like broken window fallacy - the fact remains that the original capital was apparently misallocated - despite what any future enterprise may do with the effective subsidy of vast amounts of free stuff, that money that was wasted will always remain lost, and thus the economy is worse off than if the capital had been employed efficiently from the start. Saying that capitalism is good at recycling free stuff is kind of a so what.

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#86

Post by Boothroid »

tempay wrote: post #61
mamon wrote: post #52

This reminds me of an airport in Radom (Poland). It was built few years ago, because it was an opportunity to get some money from EU (and for local politicians to get some bribes :) ). For the first two years airport was unused - the only airline that signet contract got bankrupt. Currently it has another airline operating and serves 10k passengers per year. That's what happens when EU starts giving away money.

> That's what happens when EU starts giving away money. I'm unconvinced how bad this actually is. An organisation with a ~150 billion euro budget in going to inevitably have some abuse/waste of it's resources but equally I can think of dozens of projects that have positive outcomes. Sure, it's still not okay for the ones like the airport to exist but I think focusing on them undermines the good that can be done by ha…

I guess you would similarly dismiss the corruption etc that has led to auditors refusing to sign off on EU accounts for years? And as if the EU has morality at its core.. I don't see much of that when it comes to EU policies that impoverish farmers in developing countries.

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#87

Post by NicoJuicy »

princeb wrote: post #10

A number of Chinese businesses are setting up 100%-Chinese factory compounds overseas. These compounds are located in a foreign country, but they are fully financed by Chinese, built by Chinese, employ only Chinese, have accommodation for the Chinese employees, have a completely sustaining internal economy where employees can buy food and entertainment and send mail, posts, banking, remittance, insurance, through Chi…

This is discrimination and wouldn't be possible in the EU

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#88

Post by nl »

adventured wrote: post #67
nl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not good money after bad if China isn't in it for making a monetary profit.

Sure it is. If you keep subsidizing a nation perpetually in a money-losing approach to buying favor like that, your favor loses value as they take your largesse for granted (guaranteed to happen across all of human nature), yet you keep bleeding large sums of capital forever for no further gain. Buying favor that way for China will cost trillions of dollars over time and gain them little. China will realize that if t…

This is true, but it's worth noting the US also loans money for arms sales.

China has strong and influential alliances all over Africa and the Pacific, partly because of their aid and loans program. There's a reason they sell the Asian Development Bank as an alternative to the US dominated World Bank. It's also instructive how quickly close US allies (including the UK and Australia) expressed interest in working with China on it.

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#89

Post by scandox »

Found this quote from Ai Weiwei in yesterday's Guardian very interesting:

“Can China be a global power? I don’t think so. It can gain an advantage, that’s true. But it doesn’t have soul. It doesn’t have heart. It doesn’t trust its own people. So it has no self-identity in the sense that it has never accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent judicial system. If those don’t exist, how can you have creativity? How can you be a country? So forget about China. China is an illusion. It’s there, it’s large. But nobody can tell you what it is.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-witho...

Re: What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence

#90

Post by teh_klev »

Discussion about Mattala Rajapaksa International from a year or so ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797585

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-stor...

The Forbes article has a few photos of the airport inline.

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