Benefits of raising T&T flag in Beijing
From Trinidad Express
China’s Ambassador to T&T, Huang Xingyuan, has updated Beijing’s upbeat prospects for relations with the Caribbean, with T&T identified as the centrepiece of related arrangements. It was this country that Chinese President Xin Xinping chose for an historic state visit involving meetings here with Caribbean leaders.
In last week’s Business Express, Ambassador Xingyuan characterised T&T as a Caribbean “regional power”, likening that stature to China’s in Asia. Though an element of diplomatic stroking of T&T’s ego must be taken for granted, the emerging Asian superpower’s interest in expanding and deepening ties with this country, and the region, is equally evident.
Forty years after diplomatic relations were established, it falls to the People’s Partnership administration to open a T&T embassy in the People’s Republic of China. Affirming T&T’s physical presence in Beijing should prove a critical milestone along the way to securing more mutually beneficial relations.
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar is expected to officiate at the raising in Beijing of the T&T flag. It will, however, take more concerted effort to keep the national colours flying there, to more than symbolic effect.
It’s in this sense that the Beijing mission should mark a long-overdue expression of concern with expanding, trade, business, cultural, and other ties. In Chinese eyes, the volume of bilateral trade, reaching US$450 million in 2012, remains “very tiny”, as Ambassador Xingyuan rated it.
This may surprise T&T shoppers used to seeing the “Made in China” labelling on a widening range of consumer products. Items of apparel, and even Carnival costumes, having been designed here, now figure among finished goods imported from China.
Liquefied natural gas, bauxite, and asphalt count among China’s main imports from T&T and the Caribbean. Moreover, China has invested in T&T’s vital energy sector, including in liquefied natural gas production, and in upstream oil and gas exploration.
Again, the Chinese presence is especially marked in construction—as financiers and builders of prestige structures such as NAPA in Port of Spain, SAPA in San Fernando, and the Tobago hospital. Further involvement is projected in the UWI south campus and the Couva children’s hospital. Chinese visibility has also been rising in the commercial retail sector and, most conspicuously, in the restaurant business.
One prospective benefit from the Beijing embassy will be the greater convenience in processing would-be Chinese tourists, especially those seeking Tobago vacations. The prospects of developing a new source country for well-heeled tourists should specifically engage Tobago, now seeking to resuscitate its staple industry battered for more than half a decade.
In this regard, authorities in Port of Spain and in Scarborough should follow the Chinese Ambassador’s advice in promoting T&T destinations to the rising class of travellers from his country who are willing and able to scope the world for unique physical and cultural attractions.
For more on this story go to:
