This largely pictorial article in the New York Times documents the impressive array of infrastructure projects on every continent other than Antarctica that the Chinese have tackled:
We found 112 countries where China has financed projects. While most fall under its infrastructure plan known as the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has pushed beyond those boundaries.
After years of honing its construction skills at home, China is now deploying them abroad, including a series of hydroelectric dams.
However, this version of foreign aid has Chinese characteristics:
China has a different view when it comes to labor and environmental strictures. To staff overseas projects, Chinese companies have flown in their own workers by the thousands, drawing complaints that they are doing little to create local jobs. Safety standards have been uneven.
And Beijing continues to export polluting technologies like coal-fired power plants, even as such projects have become unpopular in China.
Western governments and multinationals generally steer clear of politically volatile countries. The Chinese government has been less skittish, lending heavily to nations like Venezuela, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
But China’s lending is not usually largess. Countries that run into financial trouble must renegotiate their loans, putting them deeper into debt. Sometimes projects are left in limbo.
As both the British and Americans found there’s more to building countries than roads, dams, and bridges. For one thing infrastructure in a box of the sort that the Chinese have been producing does not leave behind people with the skills to improve or maintain the structures built including the organizational skills.
The British left systems of civic infrastructure behind them that resulted in their colonies becoming more prosperous than their neighbors. The infrastructure that the Spanish left behind them retarded the development of their former colonies.
I suspect that the Chinese will find that there’s more to making friends than building dams. As Sam Clemens put it, the difference between a man and a dog is that if you feed a dog and make him prosperous, he won’t bite you. What happens when you feed the dog but don’t make him prosperous? I can only speculate that there must be much more to China’s “Belt and Road” strategy than meets the eye, domestic objectives opaque to us.
Interesting China claim from Kling’s blog that I did not know.
“Andreas Kern and Cora Jungbluth write,
Driven by an almost uninterrupted property boom, household debt has exploded. China’s home ownership is now the highest in the world at 89.68 %, rising from almost zero two decades ago.”
Where are they getting the money to do all of this building?
Steve
In practice China only has one bank and it’s issuing lots of credit.
Yes, but only if your social credit score is high. This is interesting to watch develop. Most societies have internal forms of social control that have developed naturally. China’s experiment would be Ok if it kept it’s criteria within normal limits, but that I doubt. Mission creep will likely make China resemble North Korea with tearful Chinese professing their undying love of Chairman, President, General General Secretary Xi . He seems to have consolidated control. Soon there will be no legal Muslims or Christians there. Xi’s only 65 and may have 20 years left if he takes care of himself.
My next thought is that this looks like a recipe for revolution, but they are Asian, and they seem to have a history of accepting this kind of thing.