SHAFAQNA PAKISTAN (Shia News Agency)
A couple of years ago, a satire of People magazine’s annual ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ issue was splashed by China’s leading newspaper, People’s Daily. Any country with a free press would have spotted the story for the hoax it was, but not the staff at the Communist mouthpiece. The Onion, the irreverent US publication, had put, of all people, Kim Jong-un, the pudgy North Korean leader at the top of its list.
There was a whiff of such extreme gullibility in the briefings emanating from Chinese diplomats ahead of President Xi Jinping’s arrival in India. Except this time around, the Chinese state machinery thinks we can be similarly fooled. Does anyone who can count really believe that the Chinese are going to invest anywhere close to $100 billion over the next five years in special economic zones and building power plants, highways and bridges in India? To put that number in perspective, at the end of 2013, the cumulative total of all inbound FDI into India according to United Nations data was $227 billion, Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang observe in a blog for the Financial Times. Another sobering number is that the total Chinese investment in India in the past ten years amounts to $400 million. What is on display here is a bit of theatrical one-upmanship directed at the Japanese who said they were willing to invest $35 billion in India.
pakistan.shafaqna.com
