Great Power tragedies

China has taken this attack on its chin, and declared there is no question of walking away from the “Go Abroad” strategy that has encouraged Chinese “multi-national companies” and workers to look for greener pastures abroad, especially in search of oil. Today there are nearly one million Chinese nationals working abroad and about 7000 companies operating in markets around the world.

Ethiopia is not the first place, nor will it be the last, where China’s rising ambitions have run into local resentments. Over the last three years, dozens of Chinese workers, engineers and other civilians have been killed or kidnapped in strife-torn regions of Nigeria, Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

There are two ways in which China can manage if not eliminate the risks of working in conflict situations abroad. One is to develop closer military and intelligence ties to the host governments, and the other is to increase the presence of its own security forces at sensitive locations abroad.

Until now China has been criticised for its policy of non-interference and doing business with states irrespective of their internal political orientation.

These critics will be crying a lot louder when China really starts taking sides in defence of its growing economic stakes in large conflict-prone countries. There is no rule which says everyone must be on the same side as the West in every conflict.

Lending military assistance to one or the other competing groups is something that all great powers have done when their interests demand it. Beijing will be no exception. While Beijing is facing up to the difficult burdens of being a great power, there is nothing to suggest that New Delhi is considering ways of defending its own growing foreign economic presence.

Cambodian oil

After decades of political and diplomatic investment in Cambodia, India now finds itself out of the race for the exploitation of the nation’s natural resources, including oil. The US Company Chevron announced last week that it has found potentially huge oil fields off the Cambodian coast in the Gulf of Thailand.

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