Among the concerns about China in the United States — whether one views them as an enemy, adversary, or just a competitor — is that its rapid and global economic expansion is a threat on many levels.
One cause for the uneasiness is the communist nation’s Belt and Road Initiative, with which Beijing wields significant influence via its vast financing power from state-owned institutions. The project utilizes lending programs and other investment mechanisms that create dependency all over the world, by funding things like infrastructure projects for governments and private entities. The Initiative had been primarily associated with developing countries, but according to a report from research lab AidData at William and Mary University, that is changing. Reuters reported earlier this week:
More than three-quarters of China’s overseas lending operations now support projects and activities in upper-middle-income countries and high-income countries.
“Much of the lending to wealthy countries is focused on critical infrastructure, critical minerals and the acquisition of high-tech assets like semiconductor companies,” said lead author Brad Parks, AidData’s executive director.
The United States topped the list for official sector credit from China, receiving more than $200 billion for nearly 2,500 projects and activities, the report said.
Chinese state-owned entities are “active in every corner and sector of the U.S.”, bankrolling the construction of LNG projects in Texas and Louisiana, data centres in Northern Virginia, terminals at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport, the Matterhorn Express Natural Gas pipeline and the Dakota Access oil pipeline, AidData said.
Beijing has financed the acquisition of high-tech companies, while Chinese state-owned creditors have provided credit facilities for many Fortune 500 companies including Amazon, AT&T, Verizon, Tesla, General Motors, Ford, Boeing and Disney, the report said.
Other than Tesla, NLPC is a shareholder in all of the companies mentioned above by Reuters. In recent years we sponsored “Communist China Risk Audit” shareholder proposals at Boeing, Disney and GM. Additionally, NLPC sponsored a “Review of China Business and ESG Commitments” proposal at Boeing’s 2024 annual meeting. The “risk audit” proposals asked the companies’ boards of directors to “report annually to shareholders on the nature and extent to which corporate operations depend on, and are
vulnerable to, Communist China, which is a serial human rights violator, a geopolitical threat, and an adversary to the United States.”
As Proverbs 22:7 teaches, “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” How sickeningly ironic that multi-billion-dollar U.S. corporations turn to hostile actors, who are more than willing to utilize brutal and vicious slave labor, to help fulfill their cash flow “needs.” Not only that, but they put our own national security in question, with China consistently accused of espionage and stealing intellectual property. As Breitbart noted, “The [AidData] report said China is ‘focused on…cementing its position as the international creditor of first — and last — resort that no one can afford to offend or antagonize.”
Sounds like a pretty significant “China risk” worthy of a transparency audit for shareholders, if you ask us.
(PIctured above: an Air China Boeing 777)
