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.

At the centre of this push stands the Tbilisi Sea New City, a huge property development outside the Georgian capital. It is nearly 320 kilometres from the nearest sea, but it does sit next to a Soviet-era reservoir - a body of water that adds a splash of colour to the growing parade of concrete towers, a huge five-star hotel with the region's biggest ballroom and, just down …