China’s business community is drawing lessons from the treatment of Alibaba’s top man Jack Ma, who vanished from public view and remained so for quite some time. Clearly, he had offended the powers that be and you don’t do such things in China. So the business community is “buying insurance”, meaning they are investing in passports of countries that don’t have diplomatic ties with China. There are not many, to be frank, but the island of St Lucia in the eastern Caribbean is one of them. It has a population of less than 2 million, cost of living is reasonable and real estate affordable. The cost: $100,000 for a St. Lucia passport which, according to a government portal, offers “instant visa free travel” to 130 countries including the Schengen states. The alternative is to invest $300,000 in property and the passport is yours.
