China Builds EU Beachhead With $5 Billion City in Belarus | Hacker News Reader

China Builds EU Beachhead With $5 Billion City in Belarus

bloomberg.com

44 pointsbangkoknights27 comments

Some fun facts about Belarus:

- 51.2% of Belarusians are employed by state-controlled companies.

- Political opponents have been violently suppressed

- Per capita income $6.8k

- A fifth of Belarusian land (principally farmland and forests in the southeastern provinces) continues to be affected by radiation fallout from Chernobyl

It's fairly accurate to think of it as a place that has tried as hard as possible not to move away from the Soviet economic/social/political model.

Manhattan isn't that big as far as cities go. It's only 23 square miles, less than 8% of NYC's land area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan

A beachhead is a temporary line created when a military unit reaches a beach by sea and begins to defend the area while other reinforcements help out until a unit large enough to begin advancing has arrived.

Sometimes, bias is only in language.

This is very interesting development in European politics and "Europe's last dictatorship".

Especially since the 'threat' of China often seems to be one thing that can unite the member states.

Is anyone else reminded of the "charter city" they were going to build in Honduras? (Paul Romer had the idea, inspired by Shenzhen, of having third world countries set aside land to be under the jurisdiction of first world countries with more stable legal regimes. The plan being that this would attract international businesses and then bootstrap the rest of the countries development). In Honduras they ended up cancelling the idea, to the cheers of many in the Western press who thought it had echoes of colonialism. I doubt this Chinese city will get the same negative backlash.

This American Life did a story on the idea and backlash: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/483/s...

That [edit: was] an extremely misleading headline. It'll only be 40% larger than Manhattan in acreage.

In terms of population, it'll be 1/10th the size of Manhattan.

(Still pretty impressive, though!)

China, which signed a $3 billion currency swap deal with Belarus in 2009 to boost trade, agreed to finance the venture with low-interest loans as long as half the money is spent on Chinese materials...

Can someone explain the four-year planning of the currency swap related to the actual build-out? Or am I seeing something of insignificance related to the whole of the article?

We're on a dictatorship kick today, it seems.

Ain't no party like the people's party because it's mandatory.

Hilarious.

Although it's projected to be 140% the size of Manhattan, the article states that the city will accommodate only 150,000 residents. Indeed, the article also says that the entire country of Belarus is only 9.5 million inhabitants, just 15% or so larger than all of NYC.

So what, China wants to move some of its industry there, or does it simply want to enable its companies to send their stuff there and re-export it from there, dodging EU taxes in the mean time

This piece reads like a press release.

I wonder if this will end up like the other cities that sprung up in china that have yet to have any inhabitants…

Well, congrats to whoever gets awarded with the contracts…

> The hub will put Chinese exporters within 170 miles of EU members Poland and Lithuania and give them tax-free entry into Russia and Kazakhstan, which share a customs union. It will also let them draw from a workforce that’s 99.6 percent literate and makes $560 a month on average, half the Polish wage.

Imagine a Shenzhen on the edge of Europe. This is probably a hammer blow for domestic manufacturing in EU countries.

Chinese outsourcing and freedom from EU regulation will be just an hour or two away from every single entrepreneur in Europe.

You've got to be kidding me. Belarus is a landlocked tinpot dictatorship with an unreformed state-run economy, notoriously arbitrary government, strangulatory red tape, sanctions up the wazoo and virtually no access to EU markets, as it's outside every single European institution:

http://boingboing.net/2011/03/12/venn-diagram-illustr.html

Hint: Belarus's flag is not in there at all. Add in a near-total lack of workers skilled in post-1950s technology, English, or for that matter any language except Russian, and I'm hard pressed to think of a worse place to locate a factory.

You are right about the arbitrary government and red tape. I think you are wrong about "virtually no access to EU markets", but I will not argue it here. You are wrong about "lack of workers skilled in post-1950s technology", and completely wrong about the implication that there could be a shortage of suitably skilled labour to run the factories.

In the former Soviet union, Belarus had a very significant and comparatively modern industrial sector, producing vehicles, consumer electronics, machinery etc. Minsk in particular is heavily industrialised, and according to the Wikipedia entry:

After the last war the development of the city was linked to the development of industry, especially of R&D-intensive sectors (heavy emphasis of R&D intensive industries in urban development in the USSR is known in Western geography as 'Minsk phenomenon').

So I suspect if there is a recent history of "R&D intensive industries", finding workers to man even advanced factories should not be an issue.

> near-total lack of workers skilled in post-1950s technology

[citation needed]

>I'm hard pressed to think of a worse place to locate a factory.

How many factories have you placed? Would you put one in Bangladesh?

The article touts Belarus' monthly salaries of $650, but in Bangladesh, you can hire people for $60. And besides, multinationals don't operate their own factories in .bd, they just contract out to the lowest local bidder.

Everything you describe sounds like China in 1980. They designated Shenzhen as a special economic zone and it became a model for the rest of the country. Whether or not Belarus benefits in the long run, who knows, but it's a good deal for China.

The EU sanctions expire in a few months, and currently only target individuals and companies, there is no general trade embargo so access to EU markets should be fine. Also China and the US are outside every single European institution but there is plenty of trade.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/15/belarus-eu-sanctio...

Being landlocked won't be an issue for exporting finished goods to the EU, but perhaps there will be an issue for raw materials and component supplies.

Pop quiz, hot shot: if you're looking for an export powerhouse next to the EU, what's Belarus got that Turkey doesn't have?

Belarus doesn't have civil war and terrorists blowing things up on its border.

Yeah, because you can freely import anything you want into the EU... /s

Not worried in the slightest, to be honest.

The bottom, meet the EU. The EU, meet the bottom.

I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords!

> Last year, Germany’s openly gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, called Belarus “the last dictatorship in Europe,” prompting Lukashenko to quip that he’d “rather be a dictator than gay.”

Probably the first and last time I'll ever agree with a dictator.

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