This reads like a warning against doing too much business in China? They basically blackmailed a Brazilian company into setting up a joint venture with a local Chinese shipping / ore company by forbidding their ships to enter Chinese ports?
That's basically the way foreign trade with China has always worked, particularly sea-trade. The Portuguese were consigned to stay on Macau, and trade via a guild of registered Chinese merchants in Canton, the Cohong. Later the English and others got in on the deal. And then, unhappy with the restrictions of the system, and crack-downs on smuggling opium, from 1840 to 1914 damn near every western merchant power engaged in trade wars and gunboat diplomacy to wrest free-trade agreements and other concessions.
James Clavell's Tai-Pan is also a fairly good fictionalized treatment of the period around the first Opium War, being based on the story of Jardine Matheson.
Initially. The first Opium War was mostly the result of some very rich, but highly leveraged, and politically connected British merchants (including the East India Company, which before the institution of the Raj, was nearly a state unto itself in south-east asia) who had a massive quantity of illegal opium seized and destroyed by the Qing governor, who then proceeded to close the markets and quarantine the merchants in their factories. Eventually, amidst high tensions the next year, there was an incident between Britsh, merchant and Qing ships off Canton, which flared things up into a shooting war. The Brits rushed in troops and ships from India, and owing to the Qing empire's traditional focus on suppressing more recently conquered regions of Inner Asia and opposing Russian expansionism, the British forces met very little resistance. The blockaded the coast, swept the very much over-matched Qing navy aside (the Qing navy was more of an anti-piracy force, really), and launched an attack towards the Imperial capital.
There was a long tradition in imperial China of buying off invading barbarians to get them to go home and stop causing havoc. To some extent, this was formalized in the imperial tribute system, which was used relatively successfully to placate the Khitan, Mongol, Turkic and Manchu neighboring states in various periods. It is possible to view the Treaty of Nanjing in this tradition, at least from the Qing perspective; although from the Western side it's clearly a punitive concession of defeat. This then opened up a floodgate of other commercial nations wanting the same trade concessions (access to additional trade ports, abolition of tariffs) to keep up.
Later, with the advent of steam power, the different Western nations desired naval bases and coaling stations, to protect trade and project power. And eventually, Western nations began building infrastructure in China, at the cost of further, sometimes extensive territorial concessions. In some sense, this was accelerated by the global land-grab and prestige race between the great powers during the Victorian Age, which also coincided with the rapid modernization of Meiji Japan, which sought to wring the same kinds of concessions from the Qing Empire as the western nations.
Your description reminds me of the US compelling Japanese automakers to setup plants in the United States in order to have access to the market. I think you can find plenty of other examples, in most countries.
Can you provide any info on the requirements that the US placed upon Japanese companies to compete in the US? From the brief digging I did I was only able to find a lot of stuff that wishes the government had done so and most of the modern plants were built in the interest of efficiency and not due to any political agenda (which is also why they are generally non unionized)
"Signs of a thaw began appearing last September after Vale signed a deal to sell and lease back ships from China Ocean Shipping Co (COSCO), the country’s largest shipping conglomerate."
This issue has been building for a while. See this 2011 article.[1] Shipowners in China were unhappy with Vale, which is an iron ore producer, using their own ships.
In some respects, not all that large; from the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax): "Once all 35 Valemax ships are in service and if each ship does four round trips per year, they will be capable of carrying about 15% of the annual iron ore exports from Brazil to all destinations."
Ignoring the political issues, living in a landlocked state, it always boggles my mind reading about and seeing pictures of these huge ships. I'm not sure I've ever seen a man made object even coming close to the size of these ships.
It was pretty wild being underway on the west coast of the US and seeing a huge smear appear on the radar as a container ship swept by. If we were going north and they were going south the relative speed was really something. And the CPA (closest point of approach) would be a couple of miles, so you couldn't hear them, but wow, they were impressive.
From what I've heard, some of the larger cargo ships and oil tankers are big enough to carry the Empire State Building. And the Empire State Building is a lot bigger than any building I can think of in Colorado.
And besides, buildings just sit there. These big ships are moving machines that travel around the world. Much more impressive, IMO.
China keeps overplaying its hand. How many case studies do you need before you realize that as a non-Chinese company you are not allowed to win. This can't end well for China.
