The leading Chinese dissident, the artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei, says China’s influence has become so great that it can’t now be effectively stopped.
“The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it’s already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That’s why China is very arrogant.”
Ai Weiwei has never minced his words about China. “It is a police state,” he says.
The artist famously designed the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but ran into serious problems after he spoke out against the Chinese government. Eventually, in 2015, he left China to come to the West. He lived first in Berlin, and last year settled in Cambridge.
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54321598?
KURDISTAN: China Expands Its Economic and Political Influence in Northern Iraq. “The region is also an attraction point for the People’s Republic of China and Chinese state-owned and -controlled companies. Chinese companies that operate in the oil and petroleum, infrastructure, construction, engineering, telecommunications and cement-production industries have been investing heavily in the region, undertaking multimillion-dollar projects and signing lucrative contracts with the government in Erbil (the de facto capital) and local Kurdish enterprises since the KRG’s re-establishment in 2005.”