Class Essay October 12th

Read this press article on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a Chinese global infrastructure development plan. What are your thoughts, or more saliently, what questions do you have or what would you want to know/learn more about? What responsibilities do you think the international community should have (if any) on such matters?

I think that what the Chinese government is doing is nothing short of exploiting developing countries under the ruse of helping them. Though the Belt and Road Initiative project may on the surface seem to help countries, it is in actuality leading to massive amounts of debt that they can’t pay back to China. According to the article, it seems to be that the projects might not even be as effective as promised, such as the one anecdote from the woman who visited Ethiopia and remarked that both the bus and the road were made by China and both were barely sufficient. I would like to know exactly what the loan money is going towards, however, I understand that that is difficult, as the article says that there is trouble quantifying the spending for the Belt and Road Initiative. There is a dilemma in this situation: do we continue to let China loan countries money, forcing them into dept but also creating new infrastructure, or do we stop China from doing the project altogether, which alleviates the debt of developing countries, but they also receive no new infrastructure unless another massive project opportunity comes along.

I think that the international community should hold China accountable for their excessive lending and the effects that it has on developing countries debt, but I don’t know a solution to get China to stop loaning money that doesn’t have some drastic effect on the economy, since China is such a big part of the global economy. Even though the main problem is with Chinese loans, that doesn’t mean that the global community can’t get involved. The purpose of the BRI, from what I can gather from the article, is to increase infrastructure worldwide, and therefore also increase development. Increasing infrastructure worldwide has positive effects for all countries, as globalization occurs and developing countries are able to become more integrated with the global economy. Thus, the project indirectly involves all other countries that would benefit from infrastructure increase and especially other developed countries that have the potential to financially help pay for the projects. The international community should at the minimum help to finance some of the projects that they will be benefiting from.

There is a possibility that the newly built infrastructure could be going to waste and not being utilized, such as a road being built but it connects two places that weren’t in need of being connected. Perhaps, to continue aiding development in the countries where the BRI is happening, China should ensure not just that roads are built, but also that there are incentives to utilize the infrastructure well, such as incentivizing building homes or stores alongside new roads.

Overall, I believe that the global community should care about this problem because it affects both developing countries and developed ones, as well as China. Other countries should help finance the development of infrastructure, as mentioned in the article as well so that China’s grip on developing countries loosens.