The fate of the Panama Canal has attracted quite a few British writers from Graham Greene's Getting To Know The General to John Le Carre, who wrote The Tailor Of Panama.
Greene's book is not really a piece of fiction, although many of the characters appear fictitious, but rather his musings on his unlikely friendship and appreciation of Panama's General Omar Torrijos Herrera, the man who signed the agreement with president Jimmy Carter in 1977 which led to the handover which will formally be completed at the end of the year.
Le Carre's work is even more prescient. Although it is basically about shenanigans among British diplomats seeking to exploit fears of an uprising, Le Carre keeps mentioning rumours that the Chinese are taking a bigger and bigger interest in the canal.
When the book came out, this seemed even more unlikely than the rest of the plot, but is now being taken very seriously by certain senators in the US Congress. While Hutchison Whampoa is an unlikely instrument of Chinese expansionism, the scare reveals a trend: the rise of China as a mercantile power.
Mainland state shipping company Cosco is the Panama Canal's biggest customer. Close behind, Taiwan's Evergreen shipping giant operates one of the four main ports. Hutchison Ports now runs the Balboa and Cristobal ports.
Panamanian Foreign Minister Jose Miguel Aleman suggested that if the United States was really worried, it could buy the firm's stock in London and take a controlling share.
China is becoming the world's biggest exporter of bulk manufacturing goods like toys, textiles and shoes, and is moving into trade in electrical goods like refrigerators, televisions and washing machines.
