FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Dominican President Wants Ties with Beijing
May 2, 2018 (EIRNS)—Speaking yesterday on why he decided to establish ties with the People’s Republic of China, Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina said very simply, “we wanted to be on the side of history,” El Día reported.
It wasn’t possible, he said, for his country to progress
“without having relations with the second-largest economy in the world, which is China. Those relations had to be established at some point in history, and the responsibility of deciding fell to me, and that’s what I did.”
Yesterday, Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan met with visiting Dominican Foreign Minister Miguel Vargas and handed him a letter of congratulation and greeting from President Xi Jinping. In his own comments yesterday, Medina referenced Xi’s letter, saying that his government hopes to have
“a broad process of cooperation with the Chinese government that can be beneficial, as President Xi Jinping said in the letter he sent us last night, for China as well as for the Dominican Republic.”
According to El Nuevo Diario, the head of the Administrative Ministry of the Presidency, José Ramón Peralta, has already met with China’s Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen, with whom infrastructure and investment possibilities were discussed. Wang was accompanied by a delegation from the General Directorate of Foreign Investment, and International Development Agency. “Maritime and land connectivity were also discussed in the context of what is known as the Belt and Road Initiative,” the daily reported.
Fu Xinrong, permanent resident of China’s Office of Commercial Development in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, told the daily El Día that she welcomed the break with Taiwan, and thanked the country’s different sectors for believing that China
“can continue to contribute to the sustainable development of the Dominican Republic through the implementation of a joint action plan of cooperation in priority areas, in the framework of South-South cooperation and guided by the China-CELAC agenda”
—referring to the January 2018 meeting of the foreign ministers of China and the CELAC countries (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States).
