A brutal war since April has left at least 10,000 dead and displaced 6 million but remains a mere footnote on the international agenda.
A brutal war since April has left at least 10,000 dead and displaced 6 million but remains a mere footnote on the international agenda.
I think it was the head of the African Union who said, addressing the EU, “when I talk to you I get a lecture, when I talk to China I get an airport.”
Of course, China expects payback. Quickly. Or else.
No, that’s the genius in their strategy: They don’t expect payback quickly. It’s perfectly fine for them if you lease your new infrastructure for 99 years and pay nothing. They’ll then happily take it away from your great-grandchildren.
Yes, completely different from how the IMF and World bank behave.
China’s debt-trap diplomacy is on a whole other level.
Is it though? To me it seems they just took the post/neo colonial playbook and started applying it too. I’ve never seen a straight comparison of terms for similar investments. In either case, the country ends up loaded with debt it can’t repay, and they have to privatise something (or in the case of China, they get the asset?).
I think there are two things I would point to. One is that neither the IMF nor the World Bank are nation states, which makes their predatory lending a little different. The other is that China brought Sri Lanka’s economy to the brink of collapse through predatory lending and I don’t know that the IMF or the World Bank has gone that far with a nation’s economy, but feel free to correct me on that.
Here’s a top 10 list of debtors to the IMF, on top of which is Argentina, which, as you know isn’t doing great economically.
I’m not going to claim there’s a causal effect, as I don’t think the case of Sri Lanka can be attributed solely to debt to China either (Sri Lanka was run by kleptocrats, and had to import a lot of goods and energy, making it vulnerable to external market conditions).