Who will Evaluate the China Deal for WV, When?

The big West Virginia deal in China, value to be determined

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemist & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

While in China, President Trump signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreements talking about investing $250 billion in the U. S. One MOU is for China Energy Investment Corp. to invest $83.7 billion in shale gas development and chemical manufacturing projects in West Virginia over two decades, according to a statement from the WV Department of Commerce. For comparison, West Virginia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the worth of all goods and services produced in the state for a year, is in the neighborhood of $66 billion.

A MOU is not a contract, little more than a statement saying “we are thinking about this project.” We should do a lot of thinking about this one. Over the last 46 years, U. S. capital has flowed to China, and the Chinese have managed to accumulate very substantial capital themselves.

However, the Communist party has maintained firm control and Xi Jinpeng, Trump’s opposite number, was elevated to the same status as Mao Zedong. As thoughtful citizens know, some three-fourths of the disposable part of U. S. tax money goes into our military, designed to resist the advance of Communism, including China and North Korea. Russia is still strongly influenced by Communism.

That U. S. investment has built up China at the same time we have built up a military to defend against them, witness the “pivot to Asia.” Doesn’ this seem to be self-contradictory? The result is that China is a rising power. The headline says “China GDP Growth Eases to 6.8% in Third Quarter 2017.” For the U. S. the corresponding figure is at a more or less constant 2.8%.

Consider the proposed big deal in West Virginia. Chinese companies competing with American companies? Will they bring their own workers, as they have for projects in Africa? Will they hire American workers, pay American wages and benefits, work them American standard hours, etc.? Won’t they want cheap Chinese labor (remember Trump’s statement “I am always going to put America first, the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first.”) Remember the old adage “ He that pays the piper calls the tune.” Will the Chinese give that up?

Then there is the language problem, and our submerged racial attitude toward our smaller, yellow skinned, brothers with different customs. If they would be forced to give up the advantages of bringing their own labor, they will have to have supervisors in contact with the businesses that do the extraction (or they are less careful managers than all that money justifies). How will American bosses react to having Chinese bosses?

Now to the particular problem in West Virginia. The Chinese need the energy desperately, along with raw materials for the chemical industry that comes up with the gas, such as ethane and propane, and they certainly can use any profit they get, since they still have a huge number of people who haven’t benefitted from their recent economic expansion. And extraction leaves the pollution, sickness, broken roads, contaminated aquifers and other environmental problems, in West Virginia, just as American investment avoided pollution, and the rest of it in China when we sent capital and got their products. You can’t have large scale fossil fuel extraction without those problems. We would build up their strength (against our military) and reduce our mineral reserves, and make this resource colony (our State and Nation) less valuable and less productive for the future.

Ever hear the phrase, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And doesn’t it seem to apply in this case? It is attributed to Vladimir Lenin. You remember his politics, don’t you? Perhaps a lot of serious thought should be given to this MOU.

See also: Why $84 Billion From China Can’t Buy a U.S. East Gas Hub – Bloomberg

Tagged as: China, drilling, energy investments, foreign capital, fracking, marcellus shale, pipelines, power plants