After becoming prime minister of the tiny but strategic Mediterranean island nation of Malta in March, 39-year-old Labor Party leader Joseph Muscat has put a new priority on strengthening relations with China. This marks a major shift for the Maltese government that rules over a population of 418,000. While maintaining good relations with Beijing during their almost 25-year-tenure (apart from a brief 18-month-period in the 1990s, Labor has been out of power since 1987) the conservative Nationalist Party had focused much more on the relationship with the European Union.
PRC-Malta ties have a relatively long history. Malta was one of the first European countries to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in early 1972, then also under a Labor government. And as Malta prepared to close the military bases of its former colonial overlord Britain in the mid 1970s, it also won substantial economic aid from China (the bases were finally shut in 1979). That included providing complete factories to produce glass, textiles, and chocolate, as well as state-owned China Harbour Engineering Corporation, funding and constructing a massive 300,000-ton dry dock that berths supertankers, nicknamed the “Red China Dock,” completed in 1980 and still used today. China is now planning construction of a massive new embassy in Malta, expected to be even bigger than the large U.S. embassy.
Muscat visited China in September where he signed a memorandum of understanding that will see state-owned enterprises, China Power Investment and Shanghai Electric, invest a minority shareholding in Malta’s energy provider, aimed at producing photo-voltaic units for sale in Europe and the Mediterranean. Bloomberg Businessweek sat down for an interview with the Malta prime minister on Sept. 12th, on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum, meeting in Dalian. What follows are edited excerpts from the interview.
via Tiny Malta Turns to China, Says Prime Minister – Businessweek.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/political-factors/geopolitics-chinese/
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