穹頂之壓

韓國商務（Business Korea）Korea’s Economic Growth Rate Expected to be 0% for Six Consecutive Quarters
這挑戰也夠意思。

原來覺得澳大利亞已經決定加入亞投行，但看來當時是澳大利亞國內已達成共識，要加入，但政府還沒有正式公布。

2015.03.20
路透社Australia signals approval of China-based AIIB; Japan divided
澳大利亞新聞Australia looks set to join Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
中央英文（？）AIIB an 'Opportunity' for Australian Firms: Treasurer
英國衛報Australia on brink of joining China's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

看來思想鬥爭已經完了，氣氛也準備好了，一切就緒，等著形式形式了。

路透社說“while Japan's finance minister signalled cautious approval of the institution that the United States has warned against.”，這倒是新聞，總不能日本在韓國之前加入亞投行吧？日本央行行長黑田東彥的態度是客氣，實際上的意思是不屑，這是我的感覺，日本不會加入（參見中國為什麽建亞投行？）。



【注】
一直不太了解朝鮮戰爭到底對韓國對中國的態度有多大的影響。韓國之所以覺得美國是首要盟友，朝鮮戰爭是關鍵，美國保衛了韓國。

中國的問題是什麽？是對（北）朝鮮政策的徹底失敗。中國完全是被動、失去控製，沒有戰略眼光和全局觀念。安全問題是南韓最擔心的，是南韓依賴美國的根源。如果能將美國勢力從朝鮮半島排除出去，同時能將朝鮮、韓國納入中國經濟一體圈子內（不需要什麽從屬關係，像美加之間的關係甚好），政治上無衝突，基本一致，中國應當認真考慮放棄朝鮮，讓南北朝鮮統一。



【附錄】
經濟學人雜誌The infrastructure gap
Development finance helps China win friends and influence American allies

STRATEGIC rivalry between America and China takes many forms. Rarely does a clear winner emerge. An exception, however, is the tussle over China’s efforts to found a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). China has won, gaining the support of American allies not just in Asia but in Europe, and leaving America looking churlish and ineffectual.

This month first Britain and then France, Germany and Italy said they hoped to join the bank as founding shareholders. China said other European countries such as Luxembourg and Switzerland are thinking of joining the queue. Yet America has been sceptical about the AIIB. Its officials claim they have not “lobbied against” it, but merely stressed how important it is that it abide by international standards of transparency, creditworthiness, environmental sustainability, and so on.

America’s reservations were certainly taken by officials in the region, however, as admonitions to steer clear of the AIIB. They were enough, at first, to discourage some of its closest Asian allies from joining the initial 21 founding members. Australia, Japan and South Korea all stayed out—though other staunch American friends such as New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand signed up. The joiners argue that China was going to launch the AIIB anyway; better to be on the inside influencing its governance. The Europeans’ accession is likely to encourage changes of heart among the refuseniks. Australia has already indicated it is reconsidering; South Korea seems almost certain to join.

The AIIB is but one of a number of new institutions launched by China, apparently in frustration at the failure of the existing international order to accommodate its astonishing rise. Efforts to reform the International Monetary Fund are stalled in the American Congress. America retains its traditional grip on the management of the World Bank. The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) is always directed by a Japanese official. Partly for that reason—that the AIIB would amount to a diminution of Japanese influence in favour of China at a time when their relations are fraught—Japan is sniffy about the new bank. Its cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, this week repeated that Japan will “carefully study” the AIIB’s governance standards.

China, flush with the world’s biggest foreign-exchange reserves and anxious to convert them into “soft power”, is building an alternative architecture. It has proposed not just the AIIB, but a New Development Bank with its “BRICS” partners—Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa—and a Silk Road development fund to boost “connectivity” with its Central Asian neighbours.

Nobody questions Asia’s almost inexhaustible appetite for investment in infrastructure. An oft-cited study by the ADB in 2009 put a number on it: $8 trillion between 2010 and 2020, of which 68% would be for new capacity. As for how it is spent, 51% would be for electricity, 29% for roads and 13% for telecommunications. Among this are many projects that China sees as in its own national interest, and certainly those of its contractors: high-speed railways linking Yunnan province to South-East Asia; ports in Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (see article); a new Silk Road across Central Asia to Europe.

Despite the obvious need, America has, either by design or ineptitude, turned the AIIB into a test of diplomatic strength. That has proved a disaster. Its officials have, anonymously, rebuked Britain for its “constant accommodation” of China—and many observers would agree that they have a point. But that its closest allies have proved so keen to court China’s favour and so willing to flout American views suggests America picked the wrong fight.

China’s triumph is not unalloyed, however. The accession of so many financially strong shareholders to the AIIB will indeed make it more likely that the bank will adhere to the same sorts of standards that govern the World Bank and other international financial institutions. That is good for China’s hopes of getting a decent return on its investment in the AIIB, but less so for any residual ambitions its leaders may have that the bank might become an arm of Chinese foreign policy.

The affair also raises the stakes in America’s increasingly frantic efforts to conclude a trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with Japan and ten other countries. In his state of the union speech in January, Barack Obama advertised this explicitly as an attempt to counter China’s attempt “to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region”. “We should write those rules,” he declared. The AIIB fiasco suggests many in the world’s fastest-growing region are not so sure.


紐約時報3 European Powers Say They Will Join China-Led Bank




BRUSSELS — Ignoring direct pleas from the Obama administration, Europe’s biggest economies have declared their desire to become founding members of a new Chinese-led Asian investment bank that the United States views as a rival to the World Bank and other institutions set up at the height of American power after World War II.

The announcement on Tuesday by Germany, France and Italy that they would follow Britain and join the Chinese-led venture delivered a stinging rebuke to Washington from some of its closest allies. It also called into question whether the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which grew out of a multination conference in Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944 and established an economic pecking order that lasted 70 years, will find their influence diminished.

The announcement by Germany, Europe’s largest economy, came only six days after Secretary of State John Kerry asked his German counterpart, Frank Walter-Steinmeier, to resist the Chinese overtures until the Chinese agreed to a number of conditions about transparency and governing of the new entity. But Germany came to the same conclusion that Britain did: China is such a large export and investment market for it that it cannot afford to stay on the sidelines.

American officials have fumed that China never approached the Group of 7 — the consortium of economic powers that the United States has led — but rather decided to pick off individual members, setting a deadline of the end of March for them to decide whether to join the new organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which many refer to by its initials, the A.I.I.B.

China, in turn, has long chafed at the idea that the World Bank’s president is traditionally an American, and that France appoints the head of the I.M.F.

“This has been a power struggle,” one senior European official said. “And we have moved from the world of 1945.”

In Washington, Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, declined to criticize the countries that announced they would seek to participate, but expressed reservations. “It will be important for prospective members of the A.I.I.B. to push for the adoption of those same high standards that other international institutions abide by, including strong board oversight and safeguards,” she said.

The European decision is bound to help efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s president and Communist Party chief, to reshape the global balance of power, starting with the institutions that underpin it.

Mr. Xi’s predecessors chose to join some of those institutions, including the World Trade Organization, and work from within to amend some of their rules more to China’s liking. But with the new bank, China appears to be stepping up previously halting efforts to also build new, Sino-centric institutions from scratch. China’s control of the bank, however, will face constraints. Britain has insisted on a senior post on its board, and Germany will do the same.

China has worked for years to break what it regards as an unfair grip by the United States on global political and financial institutions and to set up rival structures more responsive to Chinese demands for a voice in international affairs commensurate with its status as the world’s second-biggest economy.
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“China is shaping an alternative universe and getting America’s European allies to support it,” said Theresa Fallon, a China expert at the European Institute for Asian Studies, a Brussels research group.

The United States lobbied its allies not to join the new China-based bank. The United States has argued that the bank at best duplicates, and at worst undermines, the role of the Washington-based World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, which has its headquarters in the Philippines, a close American ally at odds with Beijing over the South China Sea. The I.M.F., which manages financial crises, is less directly affected.

Ms. Fallon said she expected that South Korea, another close American ally, would also sign up for the new bank and that “in the end, only Japan won’t say yes.” China, she said, is offering a “whole economic and political package that provides an alternative to the creaking international structures shaped by the U.S. in the postwar period.”

Western officials and anticorruption groups have long criticized China’s lending practices, particularly for infrastructure projects in Africa involving Chinese companies, saying they foster corruption and undercut efforts by the World Bank and I.M.F. to link loans to demands for good governing. China rejects such complaints, pointing to its success in building roads and railway lines quickly in countries bereft of Western capital.

In an apparent reference to such concerns, France, Germany and Italy, in a statement declaring their eagerness to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, said they were “keen to work with the A.I.I.B. founding members to establish an institution that follows the best standards and practices in terms of governance, safeguards, debt and procurement policies.”

Snubbing the bank would have angered Beijing, but aside from earning Chinese good will, it was not immediately clear what European countries would gain by joining other than the right to endorse and help finance infrastructure projects that, in many case, are likely to be dominated by Chinese, not European, construction companies.

Europe’s defiance of pressure from Washington over the bank does not signal a major rupture, analysts said. But, they say, it does add friction at a time when the marquee project of trans-Atlantic solidarity, a proposed free trade deal, has lost much of its momentum in the face of fierce hostility from European politicians and activists opposed to American-style capitalism.

While heavily dependent on the United States for security, especially since the crisis in Ukraine erupted last year, European countries, Ms. Fallon said, “tend to take the U.S. for granted,” while “China is very good at lobbying them and promising them things.” But she said Washington had been unwise to expend diplomatic and political capital over the bank when it was clear that even staunch allies like Britain wanted to join it.

The bank was first proposed by Mr. Xi to help fund infrastructure projects in poor Asian countries, something the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank already do. China has pledged a large part of the initial $50 billion of capital, and Beijing hopes the institution will contribute to the expansion of its Asian power base, even as its growing might, economic and military, reshapes the political dynamics of the region and beyond.
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Since taking over leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Mr. Xi has steadily expanded a longstanding Chinese policy of seeking political influence through lending and investment, putting his weight behind an ambitious plan to build maritime and land links between China and Europe that span the Eurasian continent. China began the plan after a 2011 call by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then secretary of state, for a “new silk road” to help Afghanistan’s economy.

Miffed that Washington had appropriated a term China considers an inseparable part of its own heritage, Mr. Xi in 2013 put forward his own “silk road” plan. This was initially called the Silk Road Economic Belt but, since expanded and shorn of any echoes of the American proposal, is now known in China as the “Belt and Road” scheme, said Ms. Fallon, who has studied the evolution of China’s minutely calibrated nomenclature.

China first signaled its desire to set up its own alternative structures as its economy took off in the 1990s. In 1996, in Shanghai, it established a security grouping comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

The body, since joined by Uzbekistan and known as the Shanghai Cooperation Council, has Chinese and Russian as its working languages instead of English, the lingua franca of most international organizations set up under the auspices of the United States.

Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has also put itself at the center of a four-year-old grouping of 16 Eastern and Central European countries, promising investment to the region in a push for economic and political influence that has raised eyebrows in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union.

Some see the venture as an attempt to divide the European Union and circumvent the bloc’s rigid rules and standards. Eleven of the nations courted by China in Eastern and Central Europe belong to the union.

But China has voiced annoyance at what it derides as “Cold War thinking” that divides the world into fixed camps, promoting its efforts to win friends and also contracts in formerly Communist Eastern Europe and elsewhere as part of a “win-win strategy” beneficial to all.

Commenting in Beijing on the decision by European countries to join the new investment bank, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said China “wants to work together with all parties to set up a mutually beneficial, professional infrastructure investment and financing platform to contribute to regional infrastructure and economic development.”

While China has risen over the last decades to become the second-largest economy — or even the largest, by some measures — it is still sidelined at the international level by the reluctance of developed nations to relinquish their privileged places.

In one such case, the United States and its partners at the International Monetary Fund agreed in 2010 to give emerging nations an expanded role in the institution. Congress has so far refused to sign on.

Speaking on Tuesday in Washington, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said it was “urgent that we address prior unmet commitments, which have grown to levels that raise significant questions about U.S. credibility and leadership in the multilateral system.”

Failure to do so, he added, could “result in a loss of U.S. shareholding at a time when new players are challenging U.S. leadership in the multilateral system.”

文學城C君翻譯，不差。
觀察者的翻譯。