On the island of Grenada, cricket is the sport. “When an international match comes to town, everyone goes crazy,” says Junior Murray, the first Grenadian to play for the West Indies.
Those big matches are played in the National Cricket Stadium in St George’s, the capital. It was ostensibly a $40m gift from China, a country where cricket is irrelevant. The builder was Anhui Foreign Economic Construction, a state-owned firm. The stadium was finished in time to host matches during the Cricket World Cup in 2007. This year it received a $12m spruce-up. China footed that bill, too, says Mr Murray. “Let’s hope we can keep that relationship going,” he adds.
China got something in return. Two months before the stadium gift was announced Grenada’s then prime minister, Keith Mitchell, a former captain of the national cricket team, formally accepted the “one-China principle”. Grenada and Taiwan severed diplomatic ties shortly after. Twenty years on, Grenada and China are still fast friends. Chinese media noted that Dickon Mitchell, the prime minister, was the first foreign leader to visit Xi Jinping in Beijing this year. He received a red-carpet welcome.
This cricketing generosity is a thin slice of the sort of diplomatic largesse that China has showered across Latin America and the Caribbean over the past two decades. “China knows how to court Caribbean officials,” says Margaret Myers of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington. She says Caribbean countries, which are particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change, accept generous offers to build infrastructure knowing full well that it leaves them in hock to China. They take Chinese offers in lieu of offers from the United States. For China small-island countries are an easy win. The cost of adding another voting member to their bloc at the UN is very low.
The holdouts seem to be dwindling. In St Vincent & the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves, the island’s leader for 24 years, suffered a landslide election defeat in November. Mr Gonsalves spent his final months in office accusing China of financing the opposition’s campaign in order to secure a diplomatic flip. The victorious New Democratic Party promised that it would introduce a citizenship-by-investment scheme. Mr Gonsalves had resisted that lucrative business, popular with wealthier Caribbean neighbours—and Chinese investors. ■