Reality: A company which mostly bottles & exports water purchased a huge vacant industrial building, right next to a smallish city's* water treatment plant. They could start bottling and exporting 50%-ish of the that treatment plant's output.
Beyond the Sinophobia angle, this sounds like many older news stories I've seen - about some giant company suddenly sinking a giant tap into some small community's limited resources.
*Wikipedia says Nashua, NH has >91k residents, and is the second-largest city in northern New England.
EA-3167•3h ago
It is at least somewhat concerning, and I don't believe there's any need to resort to bigotry to make that case. Simply from the perspective of geopolitics (i.e. the recent statements by Wang Yi stating that Beijing doesn't want Ukraine to prevail over Russia, because that would lead to Washington turning its full attention on Beijing) you can make a case that China and the US are in opposition in a number of important current and future strategic issues. The US involvement in Taiwan, the Chinese involvement in Russia's conflict with Ukraine, are microcosms of a larger contest/conflict.
Ignoring that and pretending that the only reason for concern must be reflexive racism is... unhelpful. The facts in this case are:
The Chinese government maintains a level of influence and control over their billionaires and companies that makes it hard to separate state and private actions.
The sale of this land appears to have been for multiples over the market price, something in the range of 4x in fact.
The parcel of gives access to said small city's water treatment plant yes, but it's also between that and FAA’s Boston ARTCC, which has certain national security implications, especially if a conflict involving Taiwan emerges.
bell-cot•46m ago
(Maybe I'm too old, or have failed to keep up on current PC-speak - but I don't equate Sinophobia and bigotry. Either way, it's orthogonal to my point.)
I do not see a meaningful difference between (1) China buys the facility, bottles Nashua's water, and ships it off somewhere, and (2) Larry Ellison (say) buys the facility, bottles Nashua's water, and ships it off somewhere. Nashua is SoL either way, for lack of water. #1 does not get China a meaningful supply of any scarce resource. #2 still leaves Nashua screwed.
I'm not sure why you care about the site's proximity to some strategic facilities. China won't be basing any air wings or armored brigades there. And as the Mossad recently demonstrated in Iran, any competent hostile would base small assets (drones, missiles, operatives, whatever) in secret locations - not spots that'd be obvious for the DoD to suddenly raid, if the cold war with China seemed to be getting warmer. Or if (say) Trump just felt like doing some posturing.
bell-cot•3h ago
Reality: A company which mostly bottles & exports water purchased a huge vacant industrial building, right next to a smallish city's* water treatment plant. They could start bottling and exporting 50%-ish of the that treatment plant's output.
Beyond the Sinophobia angle, this sounds like many older news stories I've seen - about some giant company suddenly sinking a giant tap into some small community's limited resources.
*Wikipedia says Nashua, NH has >91k residents, and is the second-largest city in northern New England.
EA-3167•3h ago
Ignoring that and pretending that the only reason for concern must be reflexive racism is... unhelpful. The facts in this case are:
The Chinese government maintains a level of influence and control over their billionaires and companies that makes it hard to separate state and private actions.
The sale of this land appears to have been for multiples over the market price, something in the range of 4x in fact.
The parcel of gives access to said small city's water treatment plant yes, but it's also between that and FAA’s Boston ARTCC, which has certain national security implications, especially if a conflict involving Taiwan emerges.
bell-cot•46m ago
I do not see a meaningful difference between (1) China buys the facility, bottles Nashua's water, and ships it off somewhere, and (2) Larry Ellison (say) buys the facility, bottles Nashua's water, and ships it off somewhere. Nashua is SoL either way, for lack of water. #1 does not get China a meaningful supply of any scarce resource. #2 still leaves Nashua screwed.
I'm not sure why you care about the site's proximity to some strategic facilities. China won't be basing any air wings or armored brigades there. And as the Mossad recently demonstrated in Iran, any competent hostile would base small assets (drones, missiles, operatives, whatever) in secret locations - not spots that'd be obvious for the DoD to suddenly raid, if the cold war with China seemed to be getting warmer. Or if (say) Trump just felt like doing some posturing.