How China Is Buying Its Way into Europe
Not all of these buys are the same kind, and the same risk: Chinese money parked in prime office space is perhaps frustrating to some, but isn&#x27;t functionally any different than Qatari money, or Saudi money, or random Central Asian Republic money owning half of London.<p>Infrastructure and resource-related facilities are an entire other concern: ports, power plants, mines, refineries: there&#x27;s a national security concern here with the inconvenient subtext that China is potential geopolitical adversary, but there&#x27;s been years and years of private ownership of critical infrastructure in Europe and it was always naively assumed that worrying about conflict of interest in ownership was never going to be necessary. It&#x27;s somewhat ironic that free trade was apparently okay when Germans and Austrians were buying up Eastern European banks, or when the Spanish were buying up mines, or the Americans buying steel plants, but is suddenly worrisome when the Chinese want to renovate railways.<p>The truth, of course, is more nuanced. Europe is noticing the influx of foreign money and asking, what&#x27;s their ulterior motive, if anything? It&#x27;s relatively easy to file Qatar or Saudi Arabia as genuine investors looking to accumulate money to diversify from petrodollars, and even accept their attempts to buy mindshare and increase their profile in the hearts and minds of average Europeans, but it seems outlandish that those states would try to leverage their foreign ownership in shows of might that go way beyond that. Meanwhile, some are concerned that in a particular turn of events, China might try to do just that. People put themselves into China&#x27;s shoes, and it certainly <i>seems</i> more plausible.