You mean China borrows money to poor countries for ego projects which they can't pay back in the end (which China knows of course), like Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka.
In the end China is "forced" to pay some money again for the Crown Jewels of each country (and keeping them for 99 years) and to get even more leverage and that makes them the honorable "good guys"? That's very touching.
Interesting ;)
Ever heard of the major Chinese fishing port of Daru, Papua Nugini, just some kilometers away from Australia. But there's no fish. Strange ain't it?
Could it have something to do with the wet dream of China to control South China Sea?
“China’s armed fishing militia plays an instrumental role in Beijing’s strategy to enforce its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea,” the RAND Corporation noted in a recent report.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/chinas-bold-new-fishing-plan-on-australias-doorstep-increases-tensions/news-story/a27224ce439fe490a93a7be81efb6148
Another footnote: If China has projects in African countries they have often there 600.-800.000 Chinese workers. All of them having a military background (general conscription). As most of the building material is coming from China or china owned infrastructure I doubt if anyone actually check what they bring in. Give these "workers" weapons and you have what....?
This is getting tedious.:confused:
No sovereign lender (Note: they lend money to a country, they don’t borrow it to them) has the ability, or the need, to analyse either the borrowing country’s reasoning for wanting a project or its internal finances - they can only assume that the governments of those countries know what they’re doing and tell the truth during the contractual processes while protecting themselves by the terms of the loan contract as best they can. It doesn't work the same way as getting a home mortgage from your bank.
Note: China has already restructured, or waived payments on, 51 of its Belt and Road Initiative project loans and has never seized a single foreign asset anywhere in the world - please post a link to a reliable source if that isn’t true.
If you had bothered to read the two articles that I posted, particularly The Atlantic one, you would have realised that the Hambantota Port saga is the darling of the global rabbit hole conspiracy theorists but that none of what they allege is true.
In case you’re too busy to read it I will try and summarise what it says as follows:
‘China’ isn’t ‘keeping the port for 99 years’. A Chinese state-owned company purchased a majority shareholding in the operating lease, for a 99 years term, because the Sri Lankan government was incapable of running the port either efficiently or profitably and it was bleeding money heavily, so in desperation, and on the advice of a Canadian consultancy company, sold the lease to the China Merchants Company for $1.12 billion - it wasn’t a loan, it was a sale - the same as with Darwin port in Australia in 2015 - so there can be no debt trap.
There was also no debt default involved prior to the sale of the lease because at the time of that deal only 5% of Sri Lanka’s $4.5 billion external debt service was for Hambantota’s loan from the Chinese Exim Bank (which was loaned
seven years before the launch of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative - supposedly the birth of the mythical debt-trap), the rest of the debt was to Japan, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
They didn’t default on any of those repayments either, but when Sri Lanka received the cash from the China Merchants Company from the sale of the lease instead of paying off the Exim Bank loan, which they were free to do and should have done, they used it to bolster foreign reserves instead.
Again if this is not true then post a link to a reliable source that disproves it.
The Daru port thing was just another thought bubble, like Bali’s second airport, and has never happened although it’s simply nonsensical to say that there’s no fish there - its on the edge of the Arafura sea which is one of Indonesia’s biggest fishing grounds (designated FMA718).
In February 2021, after frenzied reports in the Australian press for months, the PNG government formally stated that they have never heard of it and there has been no mention of it since.
Again if you have a link to a reliable source which shows that it has been, or is being, built then please post a link.
As to your footnote about 600,000 to 800,000 military trained (via conscription) Chinese workers in Africa that’s just more unsubstantiated nonsense because China hasn’t had military conscription since 1949 so they would need to be 90 years old but, again, feel free to post a link to a reliable source if you can.
(Note: there are 600,000 Chinese-born people in Australia and about 7.2 million in Indonesia by way of comparison)
Besides China doesn’t need secret cadres of military trained nonagenarian workers digging up smuggled AK47s in the night. It has the largest standing army in the world, with twice the soldiers of the USA, and could take over any African country whenever it felt like it - and I daresay no country in the world would intervene :)
