Carrot and stick in China's investment policy

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The Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG), the largest operator in the Shanghai container port, has postponed a 45 million euro investment in the Belgium port of Zeebrugge. The talks about of 40 percent participation are off for the time being, writes Reuters here. Reuters:

Shanghai port, China's biggest port operator, signed a framework agreement in September 2006 to buy 40 percent of a container terminal in Zeebrugge, which was built by APM Terminals, part of A.P. Moeller-Maersk.

"We have decided to put the project on hold as the outlook in global container traffic is very different from two years ago," Jiang Haitao, the company's board secretary, told Reuters.

 But Belgium media, like here in the Dutch-language De Standaard, speculate about other reasons for what is now seen as a delay in the project, not a cancellation.  They see it as an effort to get even on the Fortis dossier, or perhaps even put pressure on the Belgium government to pay back Ping An, the largest share-holder of the now Belgium-owned bank.
As I wrote earlier this week in the case of the visit of the Dalai Lama to the Netherlands, China's central government would have no misgivings in using its investment politics to blackmail countries into what it perceives as the correct political direction. It seems doubtful that those political directives who go further than the few hot issues in China's politics. When it concerns economics or even international incidents with Chinese state-owned enterprises entering the global market, the central government seems to give very little concrete direction and leaves almost all in the hands of those companies.
What might have an indirect effect is that failures of Chinese state-owned companies in international ventures - and Fortis has certainly not been the only corporate disaster - do become very careful before they spend their capital in just another dead-end project.