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Javier E

China has built a global network of ports critical to trade - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...hina-ports-trade-military-navy

china network ports trade control sea routes

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • A decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Maritime Silk Road, the oceanic component of his flagship Belt and Road Initiative aimed at improving China’s access to world markets by investing in transportation infrastructure
  • China has already secured a significant stake in a network of global ports that are central to world trade and freedom of navigation. Although the stated goal of the investments was commercial, the United States and its allies have grown increasingly concerned about the potential military implications.
  • Xi has frequently talked of his ambition to turn China into a “maritime superpower.” The port network offers a glimpse into the reach of those ambitions.
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  • A decade later, China owns or operates ports and terminals at nearly 100 locations in over 50 countries, spanning every ocean and every continent. Many are located along some of the world’s most strategic waterways.
  • The majority of the investments have been made by companies owned by the Chinese government, effectively making Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party the biggest operator of the ports that lie at the heart of global supply chains.
  • But the investments go beyond that. They give Beijing a window into the business dealings of competitors and could be used to help China defend its supply routes, spy on U.S. military movements and potentially engage U.S. shipping, according to analysts
  • Strait of HormuzLeaked U.S. intelligence documents earlier this year suggested that China has revived an effort to establish military facilities at the United Arab Emirates port of Khalifa in the Persian Gulf, by the crucial Strait of Hormuz and just 50 miles away from an important U.S. military base.
  • Beijing is decades away from matching the U.S. military presence worldwide, but China has the biggest and fastest-growing navy in the world, and increasingly it is venturing beyond the shores of eastern Asia.
  • From having no naval presence in the Indian Ocean two decades ago, for instance, China now maintains six to eight warships in the region at any given time
  • A route for some major shipping lanes and global ports, the Indian Ocean was an early priority for China. About 80 percent of China’s trade crosses the ocean, including almost all of its oil. China’s port investments seem designed to protect the route. Beijing, for instance, has secured a 99-year lease at the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, giving it an important foothold on the busy shipping lane between Asia and the West.
  • In late 2015, China acknowledged it was building a military base adjacent to the Chinese-operated port of Djibouti. The African base was officially opened in 2017, only six miles away from a U.S. military base in the country. Located at the narrow entrance to the Red Sea, Djibouti is on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where about 10 percent of global oil exports and 20 percent of commercial goods pass through the narrow strait to and from the Suez Canal.
  • Persian Gulf and Red SeaChina’s interest in these port locations goes beyond purely commercial concerns, U.S. officials say. Many are located at strategic chokepoints with high shipping traffic. At these locations, sea routes are narrow and ships are potentially vulnerable.
  • DjiboutiChina has already established one military facility adjoining a commercial port operation, in Djibouti, at the mouth of the Red Sea. U.S. officials say there are indications that it is scouting for more.
  • Suez CanalBeijing has also been growing its influence in ports on Egypt’s Suez Canal, a vital human-built waterway that provides a shortcut from Asia to Europe. Earlier this year, Chinese shipping companies announced investments in terminals at the ports of Ain Sokhna and Alexandria
  • EuropeChina already controls or has major investments in more than 20 European ports, giving it significant sway over the continent’s supply routes. Many serve as vital logistics and transshipment points for NATO and the U.S. Navy. “It’s a significant national and economic security concern,”
  • Logink portsOne way in which China has secured a commanding position is through a little-known software system called Logink, a digital logistics platform owned by the Chinese government. So far, at least 24 ports worldwide, including Rotterdam and Hamburg, have adopted the Logink system.
  • Logink potentially gives China access to vast quantities of normally proprietary information on the movements, management and pricing of goods moving around the world. The U.S. Transportation Department issued an advisory in August warning U.S. companies and agencies to avoid interacting with the system because of the risk of espionage and cyberattack.
  • The AmericasThe original Maritime Silk Road, as laid out in Chinese documents, focused on three main routes. The plan has expanded to include the Atlantic and the Americas. Latin America is one of the fastest-growing destinations for Chinese port investments. China manages ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. It is building from scratch a $3 billion megaport at Chancay in Peru that will transform trade between China and Latin America, enabling the world’s largest shipping containers to dock on the continent for the first time.
  • The United States is still the world’s biggest military power, with about 750 bases overseas. China, with only one, is a long way from matching U.S. naval power, said Stephen Watts of the Rand Corp. “The implications of these far-flung bases have been overblown,” he said. “China would be easily overcome in these small outposts if it came to a shooting match.”
  • But China’s port network presents a different kind of challenge to U.S. security interests, separate from the threat of war, said Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. China is now the world’s premier commercial maritime power, and its strategic hold over the world’s supply routes could be used to interdict or restrict U.S. trade, troop movements and freedom of navigation in a range of different ways. “It’s an asymmetrical threat,”
woodlu

Biden to Announce Expansion of Port of Los Angeles's Hours - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-los-angeles-supply-chain.html

economics politics crisis policy pandemic

shared by woodlu on 13 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden will announce on Wednesday that the Port of Los Angeles will begin operating around the clock as his administration struggles to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.
  • Mr. Biden is set to give a speech on Wednesday addressing the problems in ports, factories and shipping lanes that have helped produce shortages, long delivery times and rapid price increases for food, televisions, automobiles and much more.
  • The resulting inflation has chilled consumer confidence and weighed on Mr. Biden’s approval ratings. The Labor Department is set to release a new reading of monthly inflation on Wednesday morning.
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  • brokered a deal to move the Port of Los Angeles toward 24/7 operations, joining Long Beach, which is already operating around the clock, and that they are encouraging states to accelerate the licensing of more truck drivers.
  • On Wednesday, the White House will host leaders from the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to discuss the difficulties at ports, as well as hold a round table with executives from Walmart, UPS and Home Depot.
  • Imports for the fourth quarter are on pace to be 4.7 percent higher than in the same period last year, which was also a record-breaking holiday season,
  • Companies are exacerbating the situation by rushing to obtain products and bidding up their own prices.
  • Administration officials acknowledged on Tuesday in a call with reporters that the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed into law in March had contributed to supply chain issues by boosting demand for goods, but said the law was the reason the U.S. recovery has outpaced those of other nations this year.
  • Consumer demand for exercise bikes, laptops, toys, patio furniture and other goods is booming, fueled by big savings amassed over the course of the pandemic.
  • The blockages stretch up and down supply chains, from foreign harbors to American rail yards and warehouses.
  • Home Depot, Costco and Walmart have taken to chartering their own ships to move products across the Pacific Ocean.
  • the average anchorage time had stretched to more than 11 days.
  • Companies that had been trying to avoid passing on higher costs to customers may find that they need to as higher costs become longer lived.
  • worsening supplier delivery times and conditions at ports suggested that product shortages would persist into mid- to late next year.
  • governments around the world could help to smooth some shortages and dampen some price increases, for example by encouraging workers to move into industries with labor shortages, like trucking
  • “But to some extent, they need to let markets do their work,” she said.
  • a Transportation Department official gathering information on what the administration could do to address the supply chain shortages had contacted his company. Flexport offered the administration suggestions on changing certain regulations and procedures to ease the blockages, but warned that the problem was a series of choke points “stacked one on top of the other.”
  • from the whole big picture, the supply capacity is really hard to change in a noteworthy way.”
  • The shortages have come as a shock for many American shoppers, who are used to buying a wide range of global goods with a single click, and seeing that same product on their doorstep within hours or days.
  • The political risk for the administration is that shortfalls, mostly a nuisance so far, turn into something more existential. Diapers are already in short supply. As aluminum shortages develop, packaging pharmaceuticals could become a problem,
  • slow deliveries could make for slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.
  • Consumer price inflation probably climbed by 5.3 percent in the year through September, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected to show on Wednesday.
  • They often point out that much of the surge has been spurred by a jump in car prices, caused by a lack of computer chips that delayed vehicle production.
  • the pandemic has shut down factories and slowed production around the world. Port closures, shortages of shipping containers and truck drivers, and pileups in rail and ship yards have led to long transit times and unpredictable deliveries for a wide range of products
  • Tesla, for instance, had been hoping to reduce the cost of its electric vehicles and has struggled to do that amid the bottlenecks.
  • the concern is that today’s climbing prices could prompt consumers to expect rapid inflation to last. If people believe that their lifestyles will cost more, they may demand higher wages — and as employers lift pay, they may charge more to cover the cost.
  • If demand slumps as households spend away government stimulus checks and other savings they stockpiled during the pandemic downturn, that could leave purveyors of couches and lawn furniture with fewer production backlogs and less pricing power down the road.
  • If buying stays strong, and shipping remains problematic, inflation could become more entrenched.
  • To get their own orders fulfilled, companies have placed bigger orders and offered to pay higher prices.
Javier E

Russia and the Curse of Geography, From Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...413248

russia geography history international foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west.
  • rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.
  • t it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography.
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  • In the past 500 years, Russia has been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1707, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans—twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941.
  • In Poland, the plain is only 300 miles wide—from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south—but after that point it stretches to a width of about 2,000 miles near the Russian border, and from there, it offers a flat route straight to Moscow. Thus Russia’s repeated attempts to occupy Poland throughout history; the country represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces to block an enemy advance toward its own border, which, being wider, is much harder to defend.
  • On the other hand, Russia’s vastness has also protected it; by the time an army approaches Moscow, it already has unsustainably long supply lines, which become increasingly difficult to protect as they extend across Russian territory. Napoleon made this mistake in 1812, and Hitler repeated it in 1941.
  • Just as strategically important—and just as significant to the calculations of Russia’s leaders throughout history—has been the country’s historical lack of its own warm-water port with direct access to the oceans.
  • Many of the country’s ports on the Arctic freeze for several months each year. Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese
  • it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power, as it does not have year-round access to the world’s most important sea-lanes.
  • when protests in Ukraine brought down the pro-Russia government of Viktor Yanukovych and a new, more pro-Western government came to power, Putin had a choice. He could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine, or he could have done what Russian leaders have done for centuries with the bad geographic cards they we
  • early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Moscow, was indefensible. There were no mountains, no deserts, and few rivers.
  • He extended his territory east to the Ural Mountains, south to the Caspian Sea, and north toward the Arctic Circle. Russia gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between itself and the Mongols.
  • Now the Russians had a partial buffer zone and a hinterland—somewhere to fall back to in the case of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor fight their way over the Urals to get to them
  • to invade it from the south or southeast you would have to have a huge army and a very long supply line, and you would have to fight your way past defensive positions.
  • In the 18th century, Russia, under Peter the Great—who founded the Russian Empire in 1721—and then Empress Catherine the Great, expanded the empire westward, occupying Ukraine and reaching the Carpathian Mountains.
  • Now there was a huge ring around Moscow; starting at the Arctic, it came down through the Baltic region, across Ukraine, to the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Caspian, swinging back around to the Urals, which stretched up to the Arctic Circle.
  • Two of Russia’s chief preoccupations—its vulnerability on land and its lack of access to warm-water ports—came together in Ukraine in 2014
  • Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defense—consolidating one’s position at home and then moving outward
  • He chose his own kind of attack as defense, annexing Crimea to ensure Russia’s access to its only proper warm-water port, and moving to prevent NATO from creeping even closer to Russia’s border.
  • From the Grand Principality of Moscow, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the European Plain is still flat.
g-dragon

What You Should Know about Unequal Treaties - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/unequal-treaties-195456

Unequal Treaties Asia Europe

shared by g-dragon on 01 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • During the 19th and early 20th centuries, stronger powers imposed humiliating, one-sided treaties on weaker nations in East Asia.
  • The treaties imposed harsh conditions on the target nations, sometimes seizing territory, allowing citizens of the stronger nation special rights within the weaker nation, and infringing on the targets' sovereignty.
  • the Treaty of Nanjing, forced China to allow foreigner traders to use five treaty ports, to accept foreign Christian missionaries on its soil, and to allow missionaries, traders, and other British citizens the right of extraterritoriality. This meant that Britons who committed crimes in China would be tried by consular officials from their own nation, rather than facing Chinese courts. In addition, China had to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain for 99 years.
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  • The Harris Treaty of 1858 between the US and Japan further expanded U.S. rights within Japanese territory, and was even more clearly unequal than the Convention of Kanagawa. This second treaty opened five additional ports to US trading vessels, allowed U.S. citizens to live and to purchase property in any of the treaty ports, granted Americans extraterritorial rights in Japan, set very favorable import and export duties for U.S. trade, and allowed Americans to build Christian churches and worship freely in the treaty ports.
  • In 1860, China lost the Second Opium War to Britain and France, and was forced to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin. This treaty was quickly followed by similar unequal agreements with the US and Russia. The Tianjin provisions included the opening of a number of new treaty ports to all of the foreign powers, the opening of the Yangtze River and Chinese interior to foreign traders and missionaries, allowing foreigners to live and establish legations in the Qing capital at Beijing, and granted them all extremely favorable trade rights. 
  • Meanwhile, Japan was modernizing its political system and its military, revolutionizing the country in just a few short years.  It imposed the first unequal treaty of its own on Korea in 1876.  In the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876, Japan unilaterally ended Korea's tributary relationship with Qing China, opened three Korean ports to Japanese trade, and allowed Japanese citizens extraterritorial rights in Korea. This was the first step toward Japan's outright annexation of Korea in 1910.
  • In 1895, Japan prevailed in the First Sino-Japanese War. This victory convinced the western powers that they would not be able to enforce their unequal treaties with the rising Asian power any longer.
  • The majority of China's unequal treaties lasted until the Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937; the western powers abrogated most of the agreements by the end of World War II
  • Great Britain, however, retained Hong Kong until 1997. The British handover of the island to mainland China marked the final end of the unequal treaty system in East Asia.
Conner Armstrong

Italian Port Chosen as Transfer Point for Syrian Chemicals - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oint-for-syrian-chemicals.html

italian port chemicals nytimes syria crisis

shared by Conner Armstrong on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro, one of the busiest in Europe, will be the transfer point for hundreds of tons of the most deadly Syrian chemical weapon compounds en route to their neutralization at sea, the organization responsible for helping oversee the destruction of the arsenal announced on Thursday.
  • The first load of the most dangerous weapons was placed aboard a Danish vessel in the Syrian port of Latakia last week. Related Coverage U.N. Says Executions in Syria By Rebels May Be War Crimes JAN. 16, 2014 Donors Offer $2.4 Billion to Aid Syrian Civilians, but U.N. Says More Is NeededJAN. 15, 2014 video Video Feature: Watching Syria's War: Bombardment on a Damascus Suburb
  • Syria agreed to renounce their use and sign the global treaty that bans them last September after an international uproar over an Aug. 21 sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of people in a Damascus suburb. The Syrian government and the insurgents seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad accused each other of responsibility.
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  • Mr. Uzumcu also thanked Italy, saying its contributions “exemplify the spirit of cooperation underpinning the vitally important international effort to rid Syria of chemical weapons.”
brickol

'Stranded at sea': cruise ships around the world are adrift as ports turn them away | W... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...adrift-as-ports-turn-them-away

COVID-19 us

shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en mass amid the corona pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard.
  • at least ten ships around the world – carrying nearly 10,000 passengers – are still stuck at sea after having been turned away from their destination ports in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the ships are facing increasingly desperate medical situations, including one carrying hundreds of American, Canadian, Australian and British passengers, currently off the coast of Ecuador and seeking permission to dock in Florida.
  • Dramatic scenes of coronavirus-stricken cruises, such as the Grand Princess in California and the Diamond Princess in Japan, have become synonymous with the pandemic. The plight of those still adrift highlights how cruise ships have become a kind of pariah of the seas, as cities push back against becoming the next home for a potentially infected vessel.
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  • As of Thursday, the Guardian had identified five ships in the Americas that were unable to unload nearly 6,000 passengers. At least three other ships were having trouble off the coast of Australia, including one which sought urgent medical attention for an outbreak of respiratory illness. Two more ships were trying to get passengers to ports in Italy.
  • Holland America said this week it had dispatched support in the form of another cruise ship carrying 611 extra staff, supplies and coronavirus test kits to meet up with the Zaandam, and that the cruise line is looking for other alternative locations to disembark passengers.
  • Passengers who spoke with the Guardian describe being locked down in the cabins, with three daily meals left on the floor outside their doors. Meanwhile the number of people reporting influenza-like symptoms has almost tripled this week: 56 passengers and 89 crew members, passengers say the ship’s captain has told them. Four elderly passengers reportedly required oxygen.
  • The fast-moving nature of the virus has added to the confusion – when many passengers left for vacations in early March there were no cases of Covid-19 in South America, so they thought it would be safe to travel.
  • cases of cruise ships being turned away from ports as a result of coronavirus fears began as early as January and escalated in February, with passengers being quarantined on the Emerald Princess in Japan on 3 February.
  • “There is a level of greed on the part of these companies,” he said. “They want to make every penny – and they make money when people are on the ships.”Cruise ships are drawing increasing government scrutiny for not doing enough to protect their passengers during this pandemic.
  • Despite Donald Trump’s repeated vows to bail out the cruise ship industry, money for cruise companies was not a part of the $500bn in aid for large employers included in stimulus bill passed by Congress on Wednesday.
  • Meanwhile a report from the US Centers for Disease Control this week laid the blame on cruise ships for spreading the virus in the crucial early weeks of the outbreak, linking hundreds of cases to the Diamond Princess and Grand Princess.
criscimagnael

The Race to Free Ukraine's Stranded Grain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukraine-grain-shortages.html

shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Baltic Sea port has silos to store plenty of grain, railway lines to transport it there from Ukraine, where it has been trapped by the war, and a deep harbor ready for ships that can take it to Egypt, Yemen and other countries in desperate need of food.
  • “Starvation is near,
  • Belarus controls the railway lines offering the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain out of Ukraine to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.
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  • But using them would mean cutting a deal with a brutal leader closely allied with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, underscoring the painful moral and political decisions that now confront Western leaders as they scramble to avert a global food crisis.
  • The Lithuania route appears to be the most promising for getting food quickly to areas like the Middle East and Africa that need it the most, even if it is also a long shot.
  • “This is a decision that politicians need to take not me,” Mr. Latakas, the Klaipeda port director, said. “It is up to them to decide what is most important.”
  • Western nations like the United States, as well as Ukraine, oppose lifting sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion but have not ruled out a deal with Belarus.
  • The war has halted those shipments, leaving around 25 million tons of grain, according to U.N. estimates, from last year’s harvest stranded in silos and at risk of rotting if it is not moved soon. A further 50 million tons is expected to be harvested in coming months. The grain elevators in Ukraine that have not been damaged or destroyed by shelling are quickly filling up. Soon, there will be no room left to store the incoming harvest.
  • Ukraine’s foreign minister, said severe bottlenecks meant that the existing routes through Poland and Romania “can provide only limited alleviation of the food crisis” given the volumes that need to be moved.
  • Warning of an approaching “hurricane of hunger,” the head of the United Nations, António Guterres, has sought to negotiate a deal under which Ukrainian grain would be transported out of the country by ship or train, and in exchange Russia and Belarus would sell fertilizer products to the global market without the threat of sanctions.
  • That means that Western governments and Ukraine are left to try out a range of possible solutions fraught with problems. Test runs of trains carrying grain from Ukraine through Poland to Lithuania, for example, have taken three weeks because of different track gauges in neighboring countries, requiring cargos to be loaded and unloaded multiples times.
  • Turkey has proposed using its ships to transport grain from Odesa, which, in addition to getting Ukraine to demine the port, would require an agreement from Russia not to hinder vessels.
  • But faced with the considerable challenges of executing such a plan, the best option for getting large quantities of Ukrainian grain to hungry people is probably by rail through Belarus to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports in Latvia and Estonia.That “won’t solve everything, but it would significantly alleviate the situation,”
  • Ukraine is opposed to any easing of sanctions against Russia but, increasingly desperate to move grain trapped by the war, is more open to the idea of a temporary easing of sanctions against Belarusian potash.
  • Roman Slaston, the head of Ukraine’s main agricultural lobby, said one challenge was that many rail connections through Belarus had been blown up by Belarusian railway employees sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.
  • “Given that the Russian Army is still in Belarus, who is going to pay to repair that now?” Mr. Slaston asked. “This is like some kind of madness.”
  • We don’t grow food to store it,” he said. “People in Africa won’t be fed by our grain sitting in bags in our fields.”
Javier E

'We Cannot Afford This': Malaysia Pushes Back Against China's Vision - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-malaysia.html

malaysia china imperialism

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • From Sri Lanka and Djibouti to Myanmar and Montenegro, many recipients of cash from Chinese’s huge infrastructure financing campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, have discovered that Chinese investment brings with it less-savory accompaniments, including closed bidding processes that result in inflated contracts and influxes of Chinese labor at the expense of local workers
  • Fears are growing that China is using its overseas spending spree to gain footholds in some of the world’s most strategic places, and perhaps even deliberately luring vulnerable nations into debt traps to increase China’s dominion as the United States’ influence fades in the developing world
  • Mr. Mahathir’s government has suspended two major Chinese-linked projects amid accusations that Mr. Najib’s government knowingly signed bad deals with China to bail out a graft-plagued state investment fund and bankroll his continuing grip on power.
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  • “The Chinese must have been thinking, ‘We can pick things up for cheap here,’” said Khor Yu Leng, a Malaysian political economist who has been researching China’s investments in Southeast Asia. “They’ve got enough patient capital to play the long game, wait for the local boys to overextend and then come in and take all that equity for China.”
  • A Pentagon report released last week said “The ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) is intended to develop strong economic ties with other countries, shape their interests to align with China’s and deter confrontation or criticism of China’s approach to sensitive issues.”
  • Malaysia’s new finance minister, Lim Guan Eng, raised the example of Sri Lanka, where a deepwater port built by a Chinese state-owned company failed to attract much business. The indebted South Asian island nation was compelled to hand over to China a 99-year lease on the port and more land near it, giving Beijing an outpost near one of its busiest shipping lanes.
  • “They know that when they lend big sums of money to a poor country, in the end they may have to take the project for themselves,” he said
  • “China knows very well that it had to deal with unequal treaties in the past imposed upon China by Western powers,” Mr. Mahathir added, referring to the concessions China had to give after its defeat in the opium wars. “So China should be sympathetic toward us. They know we cannot afford this.
Javier E

'I've Never Seen Anything Like This': Chaos Strikes Global Shipping - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...global-shipping.html

global trade supply chain shipping crisis pandemic economics

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery.
  • As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.
  • Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.
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  • The pandemic and its restrictions have limited the availability of dockworkers and truck drivers, causing delays in handling cargo from Southern California to Singapore
  • Economies around the globe are absorbing the ripple effects of the disruption on the seas. Higher costs for transporting American grain and soybeans across the Pacific threaten to increase food prices in Asia.
  • Empty containers are piled up at ports in Australia and New Zealand; containers are scarce at India’s port of Kolkata, forcing makers of electronics parts to truck their wares more than 1,000 miles west to the port of Mumbai, where the supply is better.
  • Rice exporters in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are forgoing some shipments to North America because of the impossibility of securing containers.
  • Since they were first deployed in 1956, containers have revolutionized trade by allowing goods to be packed into standard size receptacles and hoisted by cranes onto rail cars and trucks — effectively shrinking the globe.
  • Unlike the financial crisis, when the economic recovery took years to gather force, Chinese factories came roaring back in the second half of 2020, yielding robust demand for shipping.
  • Viewed broadly, the volume of global trade dipped by only 1 percent in 2020 compared with the previous year. But that doesn’t reflect how the year unfolded — with a plunge of more than 12 percent in April and May, followed by an equally dramatic reversal. The system could not adjust, leaving containers in the wrong places, and pushing shipping prices to extraordinary heights.
  • Six months ago, he was paying about $2,500 to ship a 40-foot container to California.“We just paid $67,000,” he said. “This is the highest freight rate that I have seen in 45 years in the business.”
  • Given the prices fetched by containers in Asia, shipping carriers are increasingly unloading in California and then immediately putting empty boxes back on ships for the return leg to Asia, without waiting to load grain or other American exports. That has left companies like Scoular scrambling to secure passage.
Maria Delzi

BBC News - Syria crisis: Ships return as chemical removal slips - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-middle-east-25557989

shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Norwegian and Danish ships waiting to remove Syria's chemical weapons are returning to port in Cyprus, signalling a key deadline will not be met.
  • Bad weather, shifting battle lines and road closures are being blamed for the delay.
  • The international mission is waiting for Syria's most dangerous chemicals to be transported to the port in Latak
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  • The deadline is the first milestone of a deal to rid Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal by the middle of 2014.
  • Western powers said only Syrian government forces could have carried out the attack, but President Bashar al-Assad blamed rebel fighters.
  • Under the international disarmament plan, US satellites and Chinese surveillance cameras are to track the progress of Russian armoured lorries as they carry the chemical weapons from 12 storage sites in Syria to Latakia, on Syria's Mediterranean coast.
  • Danish and Norwegian cargo ships will then transport the chemicals to a port in Italy, where they will be loaded on to the US Maritime Administration vessel MV Cape Ray and taken out into international waters before being destroyed by hydrolysis.
  • reports that the European ships are docked in Limassol, Cyprus on the day they are supposed to be escorting Syria's most dangerous chemicals out of the country.
  • The vessels left Limassol on Saturday but turned back on Tuesday after the hazardous containers failed to arrive for collection in Latakia. Now the plan is to refuel in Limassol before returning to sea in the coming days.
  • Co-operation on the chemical weapons removal programme was seen by many of those involved as a potential catalyst for broader peace negotiations in Syria.
  • Failing to meet this ambitious target, our correspondent adds, will demonstrate the difficulties involved in operating in a country with constantly changing frontlines - even with an international mandate and co-operation from President Assad.
  • "A number of external factors have impacted upon timelines, not least the continuing volatility in overall security conditions, which have constrained planned movements," a statement said.
  • The joint mission also noted that the Syrian government had met the 1 November deadline to destroy critical chemical weapons production equipment, which meant it could no longer weaponise the chemical agents at its storage facilities.
  • But deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf also acknowledged that it was a "complicated process", adding: "As long as we see forward progress, that what's most important here."
  • activists said a missile fired by government forces hit a bus in Aleppo, killing at least 10 people.
  • The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the dead included two children and that the missile was fired from a plane.
ethanshilling

Papua New Guinea Had Zero Covid-19 Cases for Months. Now It's Overwhelmed. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ua-new-guinea-coronavirus.html

world pandemic crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The emergency rooms are heaving, health care workers are falling sick, and misinformation about the coronavirus is running rife. It has all left Papua New Guinea, an island nation just north of Australia, in the grip of a deadly crisis, as a tripling of infections over the past month has swamped an already fragile health care system.
  • The toll on health workers has been severe. About 10 percent of workers have tested positive at the country’s major hospital, in Port Moresby, a city of 380,000 people that has been hit hardest.
  • The situation in the island nation is exactly what public health experts have warned of as wealthy countries buy up the world’s vaccine stockpiles and put the pandemic largely behind them, while smaller and poorer nations are left with cap in hand
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  • “We fear that we are going to fill all these beds and then we will have nowhere else to continue to care for Covid patients,” said Mangu Kendino, an emergency physician and the chair of the Covid-19 committee at Port Moresby General Hospital.
  • “They have challenges accessing health care at the best of times,” said Rob Mitchell, an emergency physician specializing in triage in the Pacific.
  • “When the pandemic was first announced by the W.H.O. and we went into lockdown, the government reacted pretty quickly,” said Dr. William Pomat, the director of the PNG Institute of Medical Research.
  • But late last year, he added, “many of us became very complacent. A lot of the things we were supposed to be doing, we didn’t do anymore.”
  • In one of the field hospitals, Dr. Nou said, he and others, dressed in full protective equipment, often work in humid conditions as they struggle to keep their patients cool and hydrated.
  • In response, Australia has donated 8,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, as well as protective equipment and ventilators. It has also deployed a small team to the country.
  • Fearing spread of the virus, the Australian authorities have ramped up efforts to vaccinate the population of the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago bordering northern Australia and Papua New Guinea.
  • “They’re our family. They’re our friends. They’re our neighbors. They’re our partners,” Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, said last week.
  • “Even for the educated health worker, it’s causing a lot of doubt,” said Dr. Nou, the Port Moresby-based physician, who has conducted a survey of health care workers’ views about the pandemic.
  • “It’s not good enough to just respond to Covid and then have someone die of another cause,” said Dr. Suman Majumdar, an infectious diseases specialist at the Burnet Institute, an Australian medical research facility. “We have feared the worst,” he added, “and this is happening.”
anonymous

Suez Canal: A Long Shutdown Might Roil The Global Economy : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-might-roil-the-global-economy

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Before the grounding of the massive Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal, some 50 vessels a day, or about 10% of global trade, sailed through the waterway each day — everything from consumer electronics to food, chemicals, ore and petroleum.
  • Now, with the ship lodged sideways in the canal, closing off the main oceangoing highway between Europe and Asia, much of that cargo is sitting idle. It's either waiting to transit the canal or stuck in port while owners and shippers decide what to do.
  • Ultimately, they may be forced to place a bet on whether the canal will be reopened soon or gamble on expensive and time-consuming alternate routes. Lloyd's List estimates that the waiting game is costing $9.6 billion per day.
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  • Ship owners and operators have some options, but none of them are particularly good ones. The adage that time is money couldn't be more true in the shipping business. For the vessels already backed up in the canal, if the waterway isn't clear for transit soon, a decision will need to be made about whether to continue waiting or go to Plan B.
  • To get an idea just what a shortcut could be lost, commodity analysts Kpler said that for a vessel averaging 12 knots (14 mph), Suez to Amsterdam, takes 13 days via the canal. Around the Cape of Good Hope, it takes 41 days.
  • The situation could become clearer in the next week, Karatzas said, but if the Ever Given looks likely to require a massive operation to break free, shippers will have to make some tough and potentially costly decisions. The same goes for vessels that haven't yet left port, although the cost in time and money for them wouldn't be as great.
  • Another possible option is to go through the Panama Canal by way of the Pacific. But many of the largest commercial vessels today, such as the 1,300-foot Ever Given, are too big to fit through the Panama Canal.
  • Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst for Braemar ACM Shipbroking, said in a recent letter to clients that the route via the Cape of Good Hope was the most likely detour, even for vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal.Last year, due to a combination of excess capacity and falling fuel prices, some shippers did just that — opting to go the Africa route to avoid the Suez Canal transit fees.
  • There is one more possibility, but it too has severe limitations. A shorter route through the Arctic known alternately as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route, or NSR, is being touted by Russia.
  • The number of vessels using the NSR has increased to several hundred each year, thanks in part to global warming that has reduced polar ice. However, traffic there still amounts to a mere fraction of what passes through the Suez.
  • The Northern Sea Route is still not considered practical by most shipping companies. For example, in 2018, Maersk, the world's largest container line, sent one of its ships via the NSR, but the company emphasized it doesn't see the route "as an alternative to our usual routes" and that the voyage was merely "a trial to explore an unknown route for container shipping and to collect scientific data."
  • Lastly, it's worth noting that a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal is not unprecedented. The waterway was closed for eight years, beginning in 1967, after war broke out between Egypt and Israel. As a result, ships were forced to divert around the tip of Africa.
  • Global supply chains, already significantly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, could be further stressed by a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal, said Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy with the National Retail Federation.
  • The greatest impact would be felt in the European market, which relies most on transfers through the canal, but given the interconnected nature of global manufacturing and commerce, there's likely also to be a knock-on effect for the United States.
  • Bisceglie said it's time for companies to consider "having more disparate [supply hubs] instead of having all our eggs on one cargo ship." Maersk told NPR on Friday that it was too early to commit to rerouting any of its massive global container fleet. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company said in a statement, that while "out of our control, we apologize for the inconvenience this incident may cause to your business and for critical shipments."
  • Like much else about the situation, it depends on how long it goes on. A weeklong delay for a few hundred ships at the Suez might have only a negligible impact for consumers, but a prolonged delay could increase the cost of shipping, complicate manufacturing and ultimately drive up prices.
  • That's $80,000 a day in fuel and an extra 10 days travel time — both to and from Asia. "So, you're looking at the best part of a million dollars with your operating costs. So it's a million dollars out and a million dollars back," he said.
  • In his letter to clients, Roach also noted problems at the Suez Canal could disrupt the flow of containers. A trade imbalance between Europe and Asia means that filled containers going west return mostly empty to ports in the east to be refilled. "If empty stocks dwindle in Asia, there is the short-term possibility of an increase" in prices, Roach wrote.
  • Overall, though, Joanna Konings, a senior economist at ING, told Bloomberg that she's "relatively sanguine" about the impact on trade. But she doesn't rule out "an inflationary shock that could come right to the consumer."
  • Shipping rates for petroleum products have nearly doubled since the Ever Given's grounding on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Although oil prices may also be feeling some upward pressure in the wake of the Ever Given incident, their increase so far has been blunted by news of further COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe that are likely to continue to depress demand.
jaxredd10

Black Death - Causes, Symptoms & Impact - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...black-death

shared by jaxredd10 on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s.
  • The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina.
  • Over the next five years, the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe – almost one-third of the continent’s population.
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  • in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.
  • They know that the bacillus travels from person to person pneumonically, or through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats.
  • The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious
  • Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersina pestis.
  • However, Europeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death.
  • Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa
  • Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes.
  • Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible
  • No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it
  • Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick
  • Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment – retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.
drewmangan1

Russia Drops Bid to Dock Ships at Spanish Port as NATO Adds Pressure - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nato-russia-spain.html

alliance history politics

shared by drewmangan1 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Russia abruptly withdrew its application on Wednesday to dock three warships for refueling at a Spanish port, shortly after Spain’s partners in NATO urged Spain to turn away the vessels. The ships are heading to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to support Russian military operations in Syria.
  • “It is up to each nation to decide, as has been NATO policy for many years, but we are concerned about the potential use of this carrier group to increase attacks against civilians in Aleppo,”
Conner Armstrong

USA TODAY: Latest World and US News - USATODAY.com - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...4531707

US usatoday Christie

shared by Conner Armstrong on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The legislative committee sent subpoenas to 17 individuals and three institutions. None was immediately named.
  • A New Jersey Senate committee is also investigating whether Christie's top advisers orchestrated or covered up lane closures near the bridge for political purposes.Two Christie appointees to the Port Authority, which operates the bridge and other bi-state transportation entities, have already resigned in the wake of the uproar over the abrupt reduction from three access lanes to one onto the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 9.
  • Christie, who said he had no prior knowledge of the lane closures, said last week that he would cooperate "with all appropriate inquiries to ensure this breach of trust does not happen again."David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, who claimed the closure was part of a traffic study, have already resigned from the Port Authority.
sgardner35

In Trinidad, Former FIFA Executive Seen as 'Our Robin Hood' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ion-trinidads-soccer-czar.html

fifa education

shared by sgardner35 on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad — In one moment, Jack Warner is on TV telling his countrymen he fears for his life. An hour later, he's standing on a packed narrow street at a political rally, boasting that he fears nothing.
  • That's how many in Trinidad see the 72-year-old Warner, now a member of Parliament. If he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, then they see no harm done
  • "If he didn't live so long, he would have died a hero," said Sunity Maharaj, a journalist who has long followed Warner. "He would have been the story of the little boy who grew up to be FIFA vice president."
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  • Warner doesn't hide his hubris and says the world's perception of him is nowhere near the reality.
  • Warner said Wednesday night he has compiled reams of documents to expose wrongdoing, adding that when he heard FIFA President Sepp Blatter was planning to resign, he wrote him and urged his immediate departure.
  • Spending a night in jail after his arrest last week was a good thing, he said, because he got to tell other Trinidadian leaders they should clean up the prisons.
  • "Sometimes I deliberately break my rear-view mirror, because it is not always pleasant to look back," said Raymond Tim Kee, the mayor of Port-of-Spain who also leads the soccer association that Warner once controlled financially. "Since I assumed office two years ago, one of the first things I pursued was rebranding because what I realized was the football federation at the time had lost credibility and there were a lot of questions and fears because of all that was going on that time."
  • "Gandhi once said that all through history, there have been tyrants," Warner said. "But in the end, they fall."
  • sgardner35 on 04 Jun 15
     
    Interesting how he says the worlds perception of him isn't close to the reality. 
jongardner04

Iranian Oil Lands in Europe for First Time Since Sanctions Ended - Bloomberg Business - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...rst-time-since-sanctions-ended

iranian oil

shared by jongardner04 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The Monte Toledo oil tanker covered the uneventful voyage from Iran to Europe with a haul of one million barrels of crude in just 17 days, but its journey has been four years in the making.
  • On Sunday, the tanker became the first to deliver Iranian crude into Europe since mid-2012, when Brussels imposed an oil embargo in an attempt to force the Middle Eastern nation to negotiate the end of its nuclear program. The ban was lifted in January as part of a broader deal that ended a decade of sanctions.
  • In southern Spain, the tanker’s arrival was met with little fanfare. It was a quiet Sunday at the refinery, and for the workers, the Monte Toledo is just one of the eight or so vessels they expect to receive this month. By the time the refinery has taken in all the Iranian crude, another tanker from Algeria will be already waiting.
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  • Around Europe, other tankers with Iranian oil are close behind the Monte Toledo. In February, 29 vessels loaded crude from the Middle Eastern nation, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Of them, three are heading toward Europe -- the Eurohope tanker is sailing to Constanta, an oil port in Romania, and the Atlantas is on its way to France. Another one, the Distya Akula, is anchored at the mouth of the Suez Canal, and is likely to head into a Mediterranean port.
  • Iran will want to win back customers in Europe, where Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other rival suppliers stepped in after the embargo was imposed. Tehran also faces a rival unknown four years ago: the U.S. has started exporting crude and companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. are shipping American Crude into refineries in the Mediterranean.
  • If all goes as Tehran has planned, the Middle Eastern country will boost its production back to the 3.6 million barrels a day it pumped in 2011. After the European embargo was imposed and the U.S. tightened other sanctions, Iranian oil production dropped to about 2.8 million barrels a day.
knudsenlu

Russia says it has successfully launched powerful new missile | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ersonic-kinzhal-missile-launch

russia missile politics crisis

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Russia has said it successfully launched a hypersonic missile described by Vladimir Putin as an ideal weapon when he unveiled new armaments earlier this month.
  • The Kinzhal missile was one of the weapons the Russian president unveiled in his state of the nation address earlier this month, ahead of a presidential election on 18 March that he is all but guaranteed to win.
  • One of the technologies Putin touted was a robotic torpedo that could hit an US port city, but Mattis said that makes no difference as Russia already can target US port cities with missiles. “It doesn’t change anything other than how much money do they want to spend on something that does not change at all the strategic balance,” he said.
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  • Since the start of the year, more than 250 sorties have been carried out by the aircraft to perfect the missile system, the defence ministry said.
malonema1

Migrant caravan seeking asylum faces a tough uncertain future - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...tough-uncertain-future-n870156

US history crisis

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • TIJUANA, Mexico — More than a hundred migrants who made a grueling journey to the U.S. border were stranded on the last leg of their trip on Monday as they waited to plead their case to seek asylum after immigration officials said the crossing was at capacit
  • How long the asylum seekers will have to wait to plead their case is just the beginning of the uncertain and potentially monthslong process ahead of them. The port of entry remained at capacity Monday morning, an official with Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.
  • She broke down crying the day before after learning she would not be allowed to make her claim for asylum that day. She said she was seeking asylum after gang members came after her and her daughter because her boyfriend owed them money.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mensing said the group was prepared to wait outside the port of entry and was willing to risk the hurdles ahead because they were fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Many of the migrants are from Central America, predominantly Honduras.“No one is asking for some sort of immediate citizenship — the people on this caravan know that the most likely thing for them is that they will be detained indefinitely, they may be separated from their children,” said Mensing. “They’re not coming here because they think it’s easy, they’re coming here because they’re fearing for their lives.
  • The asylum seekers began their trek together near the Guatemalan border on March 25, making their way on foot, by train and by bus north through Mexico before coming to their destination at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. At one point the caravan numbered roughly 1,200, but its numbers have dwindled after some chose to seek asylum in Mexico and others decided not to risk turning themselves in to immigration authorities.
  • Immigration judges vary in whether they accept claims based on fear of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Some judges permit asylum for women and children targeted by criminal gangs for recruitment, finding that they are persecuted due to "membership in a particular social group," but other judges do not
g-dragon

Which Asian Nations Were Never Colonized by Europe? - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/not-colonized-by-europe-195273

nations European colonization

shared by g-dragon on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Between the 16th and 20th centuries, various European nations set out to conquer the world and take all of its wealth.
  • Rather than being colonized, Japan became an imperial power in its own right.
  • uncomfortable position between the French imperial possessions of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) to the east, and British Burma (now Myanmar) to the west
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • managed to fend off both the French and the British through skillful diplomacy. He adopted many European customs and was intensely interested in European technologies. He also played the British and French off of one another, preserving most of Siam's territory and its independence.
  • The Ottoman Empire was too large, powerful, and complex for any one European power to simply annex it outright.
  • the European powers peeled off its territories in northern Africa and southeast Europe by seizing them directly or by encouraging and supplying local independence movements.
  • the Ottoman government or Sublime Porte had to borrow money from European banks to finance its operations. When it was unable to repay the money it owed to the London and Paris-based banks, they took control of the Ottoman revenue system, seriously infringing on the Porte's sovereignty. Foreign interests also invested heavily in railroad, port, and infrastructure projects, giving them ever more power within the tottering empire. The Ottoman Empire remained self-governing until it fell after World War I, but foreign banks and investors wielded an inordinate amount of power there.
  • Like the Ottoman Empire, Qing China was too large for any single European power to simply grab. Instead, Britain and France got a foothold through trade
  • Both Great Britain and Russia hoped to seize Afghanistan as part of their "Great Game" - a competition for land and influence in Central Asia. However, the Afghans had other ideas; they famously "don't like foreigners with guns in their country,
  • They slaughtered or captured an entire British army
  • , that gave Britain control of Afghanistan's foreign relations,
  • This shielded British India from Russian expansionism while leaving Afghanistan more or less independent.
  • Like Afghanistan, the British and Russians considered Persia an important piece in the Great Game
  • Russia nibbled away at northern Persian territory
  • Britain extended its influence into the eastern Persian Balochistan region
  • Like the Ottomans, the Qajar rulers of Persia had borrowed money from European banks for projects like railroads and other infrastructure improvements, and could not pay back the money.  Britain and Russia agreed without consulting the Persian government that they would split the revenues from Persian customs, fisheries, and other industries to amortize the debts. Persia never became a formal colony, but it temporarily lost control of its revenue stream and much of its territory - a source of bitterness to this
  • Nepal, Bhutan, Korea, Mongolia, and the Middle Eastern protectorates:
  • Nepal lost about one-third of its territory to the British East India Company's
  • However, the Gurkhas fought so well and the land was so rugged that the British decided to leave Nepal alone as a buffer state for British India. The British also began to recruit Gurkhas for their colonial army.
  • Bhutan, another Himalayan kingdom, also faced invasion by the British East India Company but managed to retain its sovereignty.
  • they relinquished the land in return for a tribute of five horses and the right to harvest timber on Bhutanese soil. Bhutan and Britain regularly squabbled over their borders until 1947, when the British pulled out of India, but Bhutan's sovereignty was never seriously threatened.
  • g-dragon on 24 Oct 17
     
    A list of Asian nations that the Europeans were unable to colonize and why. This shows us the strengh that Europe gained and had especially during the expansion era. We also see how the Ottoman Empire fell and patterns with other nations.
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