China’s Belt and Road initiative in a post-Covid world

The Headlines In the 17th Feb. issue of Time magazine, in a lead article headlined “The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century” their political columnist wrote “the crisis has already demonstrated that the centralization of political power under Xi has made Chinese society brittle. The question now is what it will endure before it begins to crack.” The South China Morning Post in an article around the same time predicted “Closure of overseas...

China’s One Belt One Road, threat or a major opportunity?

Earlier this year, the first train rumbled down the tracks of a $3.4 billion electric railway connecting landlocked Ethiopia with Djibouti and its access to the Red Sea. The 750-kilometer (466 miles) line, expected to carry up to five million tons of goods per year. Around the same time on a different continent,after 18 days and 28,000 kilometers, the first-ever direct China-to-Britain freight train pulled into London. It passed through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium...

Illegal migration and the EU’s mis-targeted response

In 2015, according to Frontex, the EU Agency for protection of EU borders, a record of 1,820,000 illegal immigrants entered the EU (these were the ones officially detected and recorded, at least another 400,000 are thought to have escaped detection). Of these illegal migrants, most of the flow from Africa is focussed on using Libya as a launching pad into Europe. Italy and to a lesser extent Malta, are the reluctant hosts. In Malta where I live, we see a lot more Eritreans, Somalis and to a...