Canal Red

A Chinese "businessman" is building a competitor to the Panama Canal, cutting across 172 miles of the commie-infested hell known as Nicaragua:

At the [groundbreaking] ceremony, the canal’s impresario—a Chinese billionaire named Wang Jing —spoke fulsomely about the canal, describing the project as “the most important in the history of humanity.” His audience mostly consisted of local officials and about two hundred Chinese and Nicaraguan employees in yellow and white hard hats and orange and blue jumpsuits. Later that day, Wang, a pudgy man in his early forties, appeared at an event in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, with Daniel Ortega, the former Marxist guerrilla turned born-again Christian who has become the country’s eternal President. Ortega pushed through the bill that last year granted a fifty-year, renewable canal concession to Wang.

Wang’s development plans, approved last summer by the Nicaraguan Congress, which is dominated by Sandinista Party loyalists, call not only for the canal but also for new seaports on both coasts, new satellite cities along the canal route, and tourist resorts. They also include a new railroad, highways, an oil pipeline, and steel and cement mills.

Industrial development and expansion of the power grid are good things. They help to pull poverty-stricken primitive societies into the modern world, and that's a step forward for everybody. But there's a catch:

There has been much speculation about Wang’s relationship with the Chinese government. He insists that he is a “private businessman,” but Nicaraguans and others who have met him and visited his corporate offices in China have come away convinced that he is is well-connected in Communist Party circles. The Ortega government, never known for its transparency, has been particularly opaque about its dealings with Wang, increasing concern about corruption in the canal concession.

In other words, the ChiComs want to buy a Third World country so they can build themselves a canal to compete with ours. Now who are the imperialists? Gotta hand it to them; they've learned their lessons well and have become the yankee traders we used to be.