With regard to the maritime component of China’s Belt and Road strategy, international media have paid much attention to the growing involvement of Chinese companies in foreign ports. A less visible component of the 21st century maritime silk road is the role of China in shipping finance. According to Virginia Marantidou in a publication by The Jamestown Foundation, prominent Chinese providers of shipping finance ‘prioritize lending to international firms who intend to build their ships in Chinese yards’. She also writes that Chinese banks are on their way to become global players in the shipping sector: ‘This entails greater shipping power for China, which coupled with funding, and building of maritime infrastructure across the world will give it greater leverage and influence over the global shipping routes, and greater control over global supply chains’ [Shipping Finance: China’s New Tool in Becoming a Global Maritime Power].
One of the foreign ports in which a Chinese company plays a significant role is Gwadar in Pakistan. The Pakistani financial newspaper Business Recorder published an article that highlights the lack of transparency at the China Overseas Ports Holding Company (COPHC), which in 2013 obtained a 40-year lease for operating Gwadar Port and Gwadar Free Zone. As such the company plays a prominent role in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is the largest country-specific cluster of projects within the Belt and Road strategy. According to COPHC it is based in Hong Kong, but it is unclear who owns the company. According to the Business Recorder, it is generally assumed that COPHC is ultimately controlled by the Chinese government but it turned out impossible for the newspaper to verify whether this is indeed the case. Therefore the article criticises not the company itself but rather the Pakistani and Chinese governments. It states that: ‘As a private company, the [COPHC] may be well within its rights not to disclose its key corporate particulars, but the government of Pakistan cannot afford such secrecy. Ports are strategic assets. And therefore, the public, especially businesses, have the right to know in whose hands rests the fate of CPEC before they go about making grand business plans. The Chinese government, too, should consider that it is at the risk of making OBOR an international joke with the central pillar of its flagship project (CPEC) being built by a firm that has unknown credentials at best and questionable at worst’ [The mysterious China Overseas Ports Holding Company].
Frans-Paul van der Putten
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