China puts its stamp on Georgia's economy

Tbilisi, Georgia

SCOTT Mi, a businessman from western China, stood on a balcony on one of the nine completed towers of 27 that his company plans to build and gestured towards the distant hilltop boundary of his improbable domain: a new, Chinese-built city rising atop one of the most volatile geopolitical fault lines left by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Everything you can see is ours," said Mr Mi, the 32-year-old head of Hualing Group Georgia, a privately owned but mostly state-funded company in the vanguard of an effort by China to extend its economic reach into the rocky and often treacherous ground of the Caucasus.