LAST WEEK’S piece about the Athlone trading hub and its rivals in Wirral Waters has prompted a response from elsewhere in Europe.

There seem to be more plans for Euro-Chinese trading hubs than countries in the EU, and they all have valuable lessons about knowing who your backers are when planning multi-million euro trading hubs.

My esteemed German colleague Bernhard Bartsch writes in the Frankfurter Rundschau of a 200,000 sq m project that is planned in Bad Vilbel near Frankfurt.

The Chinese investors and the town of Bad Vilbel have signed a memorandum of understanding – those wonderful statements of intent that can so often turn into painful reminders of shattered dreams.

The mayor of Bad Vilbel, Thomas Stoehr, and the Chinese side will now examine the contract to find common ground on the establishment of a Chinese trading hub in Europe in Bad Vilbel, which would create jobs for the town.

Again, putting a name on the Chinese backers seems like hard work – I can say this having spent all week trying to get the Chinese backers of the Athlone project on the telephone for some clarification.

For the German side, a different problem is emerging – one of the potential backers of the project is the city of Linyi.

This is the charming town where Chen Guangcheng, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, was held under illegal house arrest after his release from prison on trumped-up charges in 2010. He has since left for the US with his family.

In November last year the Hollywood studio Relativity Media came under fire from human rights groups for shooting a movie in Linyi, and hailing its close links to the local Communist Party.

This was at a time when the area around Chen’s house was out of bounds and thugs were beating up his family on a regular basis. Relativity was forced into damage-control mode.

A couple of weeks later Batman actor Christian Bale went to Linyi to visit Chen and was jostled by security guards, in an incident that raised the profile of Chen’s plight, and also helped repair some of Bale’s street cred, which had been damaged by his decision to star in The Flowers of War, a movie that was seen by some as a Chinese nationalist tract.

One good sign for Bad Vilbel is that Linyi seems to have money to spare – it no longer has to spend €6 million on security to guard Chen and his family.

The blind activist’s daring escape shows the money probably wasn’t that well spent anyway.