“We don’t want this to become an international joke, and we don’t want it to turn into an example of Chinese investment failures.” Wang Jing Chinese entrepreneur

Wang Jing, meet William Walker.

By most standards of measurement, these two individuals would seem to represent two distinct breeds of men, hailing as they do from different cultures and different countries — not to mention different centuries.

But Wang Jing of Beijing is nowadays seized by the same grand and tantalizing prospect that long obsessed an American named William Walker — the dream of building a canal across the Central American republic of Nicaragua. More direct and therefore cheaper, such a waterway would provide a better route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, or between the east and west coasts of the United States, than the canal that was eventually built, the one through Panama.

Still, no matter which century you’re in — the 19th or the 21st — the challenge of a Nicaraguan route remains a breathtaking proposition, a test of political skill, physical engineering and personal mettle that has so far defied all comers.

Take Walker, a diminutive, fast-talking southerner from Tennessee. He tried to accomplish the feat during the 1850s, with disastrous results. First, he declared himself the president of Nicaragua, only to wind up losing a jungle war against a Central American army — one partly bankrolled by rival American entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt. Walker was executed by a Honduran firing squad in 1860, aged 36.

That was where overweening ambition could get you, if you were a gringo in Central America a century and a half ago.

Cue the present and enter, stage left, a Chinese businessman who has considerable experience in telecommunications but no history of tackling colossal transportation projects, much less a continent-cleaving canal.

Nonetheless, Chinese industrialist Wang Jing is now preparing to attempt the same engineering achievement that eluded William Walker more than 150 years ago. It may well be the largest, most expensive infrastructure plan in development anywhere in the world.

The resulting waterway could potentially dwarf the economic fortunes of the once-mighty Panama Canal, while causing a major shift in international trade and signalling what may well become a reconfiguration of global politics.

Where are the Americans?

This past June, Wang received a 50-year concession for the project, courtesy of the Nicaraguan government. Pending the results of a feasibility study — now underway — the concession grants Wang a green light to dig.

The Chinese entrepreneur says he is ready to do exactly that, to start work on what is by any measure a gigantic undertaking, a canal that would bisect Central America’s largest country, joining existing rivers and Latin America’s second largest lake with a series of man-made channels.

Just think: here comes a Chinese engineering concern with a proposal to tackle what is possibly the world’s most ambitious infrastructural project, one that just happens to be located in Central America, a neck of the geopolitical woods that Washington has long regarded — and treated — as its private backyard.

What’s more, the Americans have yet to utter a peep in protest.

“During recent years, the U.S. has been preoccupied by other issues, especially the Middle East,” says Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. “We didn’t have a clearly defined Latin American policy. We still do not have an articulated policy.”

There used to be a policy — the notorious Monroe Doctrine, an oft-cited 1823 U.S. diktat that declared the Americas off limits to outside powers. But things are apparently different now.

Opponents of the project have staged demonstrations in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, but most Nicaraguans are said to be happy with the scheme, at least so far.

“It means a large investment in the country, jobs,” says Hector Palacios Galo, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua. “There will be more money, more work. Of course, the greater part of the Nicaraguan people are in agreement.”

As well they might be.

After all, Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Americas, with a per capita gross domestic product that is superior only to that of woebegone Haiti. The proposed canal would make a huge economic difference to the republic’s 6 million inhabitants, as long as the profits aren’t all spirited away by those at the top.

That is hardly a remote prospect.

“There is so much money to be made from that canal that few could resist it,” says Birns. “Nicaragua is rated as one of the most corrupt countries in Latin America. It doesn’t have a mature government with long-term goals. Nicaragua is kind of a champion of opportunism.”

Environmentalists are also likely to have qualms about the project, which would cross vulnerable water systems and stretches of more or less pristine forest. The varieties of flora and fauna that might be threatened include the storied bull sharks of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River, an aquatic species with the unusual ability to migrate between fresh and salt water.

“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some environmental protests,” says Susan Purcell, head of the Latin America studies program at the University of Miami.

Whatever its ecological impact, the idea of a Nicaraguan canal might, to some, seem merely redundant.

After all, Central America already has a man-made transcontinental waterway — the Panama Canal, which began operating 99 years ago, in 1914. It has united the world’s two largest oceans ever since, nowadays handling 5 per cent of the world’s seagoing cargo traffic.

But the Panama Canal has problems. For one thing, at least in places, it’s either too shallow or too narrow to accommodate the massive draught and beam of many modern vessels. Limitations such as these have helped clear the way for newer competition.

The Panamanian marvel

The construction of the Panama Canal was, for its time, an extraordinary accomplishment.

The French were the first to try. They sought to build a channel across the isthmus during the 1880s, but were flummoxed by a combination of tropical diseases and the inadequacy of their machinery. By some estimates, more than 22,000 men died in the failed attempt.

At the time, Panama was not independent — it belonged to Colombia. After the French abandoned their work, Washington petitioned Bogota for permission to try. The Colombians said no.

But the Americans did not let a little thing like sovereignty get in the way. Instead, Washington threw its support behind an existing Panamanian insurgent movement. When the insurgents declared the independence of their new “country,” the Americans immediately granted official recognition to the fledgling state. That was in 1903. Colombia’s objections were noted but ignored.

Work on the canal began the following year. The Americans employed powerful locomotives, massive steam shovels and armies of men. Upwards of 40,000 workers laboured on the project at a time, most imported from the Caribbean. A decade later, the job was done.

Dubbed the Panama Canal, the facility was not really Panamanian at all. It was an American operation from the outset.

Not only did Washington control the canal itself, but the U.S. also enjoyed sovereignty over eight-kilometre-wide buffers on either side, a territory known as the Canal Zone. There, the Americans who ran the operation — known as “Zonians” — lived lives of U.S.-style wealth and ease, while most Panamanians remained trapped in poverty.

By the 1960s, this arrangement had become politically untenable and sparked violent street protests. In 1977, then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty with Omar Torrijos, his Panamanian counterpart, which led to the gradual transfer of authority over the canal, a process that culminated in full local control in 2000.

Panama falls behind

Panamanian authorities are now racing to complete a $5.25-billion reconstruction that will greatly enhance the channel’s capacity.

But it’s not clear that the world’s largest shipping companies will continue, or resume, using the Panama route.

Earlier this year, Danish-owned Maersk Line, the planet’s biggest fleet of container vessels, announced it would cease traversing Panama owing to a combination of high tolls and uneconomical restrictions on ship size.

Even following the work now being done to expand the Central American channel — scheduled for completion in mid-2015 — the waterway will still be unable to handle the largest of the vessels now plying the world’s oceans, to say nothing of the behemoths planned for the future.

The size of container ships is measured in something called “20-foot equivalent units,” or TEUs, each of which approximates the length of a single cargo container. At present, the Panama Canal can handle vessels measuring up to 4,500 TEUs, a benchmark known in the industry by the abbreviation “Panamax.”

With the addition of two new systems of locks as well as the dredging of existing channels, the waterway will be able to handle ships measuring as much as 12,000 TEUs, which insiders already refer to as “New Panamax.”

That seems like a huge improvement, until you consider that vessels of up to 18,000 TEUs are already being built, while container ships of the near future may well be as large as 30,000 TEUs.

Built from scratch, a Nicaragua canal could be far better equipped to handle the new seaborne giants.

Plus, a route through Nicaragua rather than Panama would shorten voyages between the Atlantic and the Pacific by about 800 kilometres for a trip between New York City and California, saving time and money.

Panamanian authorities profess to be unperturbed by the prospect of a Central American competitor.

“We don’t consider there will be any competition,” the country’s foreign minister, Fernando Nunez Fabrega, told British journalists during a recent trip to London. “We have never taken it seriously.”

He said Nicaragua, unlike Panama, is prone to hurricanes and earthquakes. Plus, the sky-high cost of the project would make it uneconomic.

“Our canal is already paid off,” Nunez Fabrega said. “If you invest $40 billion, repayment will take 200 years.”

Wang Jing’s plan

Wang Jing, the Chinese entrepreneur behind the Nicaragua project, says he has already considered most of the potential obstacles his project might face.

“We don’t want this to become an international joke, and we don’t want it to turn into an example of Chinese investment failures,” Wang said during a recent news conference in Beijing.

According to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek, Wang first studied medicine before turning his hand to business. He now oversees more than 20 companies — principally Xinwei Telecom Technology — with interests in some 35 countries.

His newest enterprise, the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co., has more than a canal in mind. Its associated projects are said to include an oil pipeline, two deep-water ports, a transcontinental railway and two airports — all for $40 billion. For perspective, that figure is about four times greater than Nicaragua’s GDP.

“Our investors are big banks and other large institutions,” he recently told The Telegram, without being specific. “They are first-class investors.”

Not everyone is convinced that Wang is for real.

Some doubters cite his almost complete lack of experience with major engineering projects — in fact, with engineering projects on any scale.

“My sense is a lot will depend on the credibility of the Chinese to do this,” says Purcell at the University of Miami.

One thing’s sure: it won’t be easy.

“It was different when the Panama Canal was being built,” Purcell says. “There was no such thing as an environmental movement or democracy as we know it. Even indigenous people are rebelling now, in Ecuador and elsewhere. We’re in a different era now.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

William Walker’s failures

A Nicaraguan canal was first broached in the late 1500s at the royal court in Madrid during the reign of King Felipe II. Later, Spain conducted several preliminary surveys of possible routes for a waterway across Nicaragua. For Americans, dreams of a Nicaraguan canal stretch back at least to the 1820s, during the presidency of John Quincy Adams.

“Nicaragua has long been considered, from the very beginning,” says Purcell.

The most colourful advocate of building a canal through Nicaragua was the aforementioned William Walker, who combined modest stature — he stood just 5-foot-2 — with an imposing intellect. He graduated from the University of Nashville at age 14 and added degrees in law and medicine from the University of Pennsylvania before he reached 20.

And yet, in most other respects, Walker was a thoroughgoing failure. He washed out as a doctor, a lawyer and a journalist. He even tried his hand at prospecting for gold in California — once again, with no luck.

Later, with backing from a pro-slavery organization in the American South, he spent several years in Mexico trying to transform the states of Sonora and Baja California into slave territories, without success. Next, he set off for Nicaragua with a private army of 58 men and two objectives — to convert the Central American republic to slavery and to oversee the construction of a canal.

With political support from Nicaragua’s Liberal Party, Walker and his fighters won an initial armed skirmish with militants from the country’s Conservative Party. Thus emboldened, Walker declared himself president.

Infuriated by this interfering gringo, Central Americans mustered an opposing army that was partly funded by Vanderbilt, a wealthy financier who harboured his own dreams of building a Nicaraguan canal.

The ill-starred Walker was put to flight, and his army dispersed. After a time spent licking his wounds in the United States, he made the mistake of returning to the region — he still regarded himself as Nicaragua’s president — and was promptly captured and subsequently executed.

What route?

Wang Jing is probably safe from comparable perils, but there is still much that could go wrong with his project. For one thing, Wang has yet to settle upon a precise route.

The most likely course would begin on the Pacific coast at Brito and proceed across Lake Nicaragua, before traversing the jungles of central Nicaragua. Next, it would burrow through the flatlands of the eastern coast, finally joining the Caribbean Sea at Bluefields. But at least four other possibilities are under study.

Critics also warn that Nicaraguans’ support for the project could change, especially if economic benefits fail to trickle down to the masses. Or if they become disenchanted with the current government, headed by former Sandinista guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega.

“The Sandinistas may not be in power forever,” says Purcell. “Will the people of Nicaragua feel they’re benefitting from the canal or will they think it just increases the corruption?”

And will a former medical student named Wang Jing prove himself to be more persistent than the French were in Panama in the 1880s?

Nicaraguans — and the world — are soon to find out.

Canals: Nicaragua vs. Panama

Nicaragua Canal

Late 2014

Expected start of construction

5 years

Estimated construction time

$40 billion

Rumoured cost of construction

280 kilometres

Approximate length

-

Panama Canal

1880

Year the French broke ground

1889

Year the French abandoned project

1904

Year the Americans broke ground

10 years

Total construction time

$375 million

Cost of construction

77 kilometres

Length

Sources: Panama Canal, USA Today

Read more about: