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Comment by vthallam | Hacker News Reader

I know this article is more about tech companies, but China is winning everywhere. They have started a very ambitious OBOR to connect Europe, Africa and Asia. The Chinese investments in Europe is just mind boggling [0] and the infrastructure projects by the Chinese Govt are spread across the whole Asia, Africa and Europe.

Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries, the Chinese loan tons of money to build infrastructure and it is so much that the small countries will not be able to pay and literally submit to the Chinese. [1]

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-china-business-in-eu... [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-chin...

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Kind of a United Fruit model of economic investing which resulted in the pejorative banana republic and resulting cries of American Imperialism, and subsequent loss in economic growth as AmCos pulled out due to instability.

Wonder if they can avoid a similar fate. Maybe people are wiser on both sides, one can hope.

My impression is that much of this "instability" was largely the result of American military/intelligence intervention that came in response to the local government seizure and nationalization of these industries.

Superficially maybe. My impression is most of the instability was countries with govts with too weak an effort to transition from an agricultural society to a goods and services centered one, this resulted in an ill advised call for land redistribution and other unrest rather than making education necessary for all kids. Even now many illegal manual labor immigrants to the US lack basic education.

> Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries

how is the chinese doing any different than what the USA did/might've done with foreign aid and other strings attached loans? In the end, it's a form of empire building.

The difference is that know the rest of the world is aware of it it whereas in the past, they were not as aware.

I know that may not be the answer you want to hear but " image " is huge in China.

That's a breathtakingly ignorant assertion. The "strings attached" to U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S. They are things like economic reforms and measures to limit corruption. There is definitely an ideology behind it, and its paternalistic, but it's not empire building. It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but by teaching them to live and govern themselves like we do.

(Source: my dad spent his career doing USAID work; grew up surrounded by USAID, World Bank, etc., folks.)

Exactly. The US just hopes the money will be used for the welfare of the country and hoping for some soft power when it's required. On the other hand, the Chinese are just loaning the money and making other countries explicitly owe them.

No need to call others' opinions ignorant when you have another one. Here's a good book dealing with foreign aids, among other things:

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

I use "ignorant" quite deliberately; the opinion of U.S. foreign aid as having strings attached to benefit the U.S. is literally ignorant of what U.S. foreign aid projects and funding look like.

I haven't read the book, but de Mesquita is addressing something different, the fact that foreign aid can enable bad leaders to stay in power by giving them a flow of benefits they can use to reward cronies and placate the populace: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10DeMesquita.html. That may well be true, but it's a criticism of foreign aid in general; note that de Mesquita is associate with the Hoover Institution, which believes that government-to-government foreign aid is inherently misguided: https://www.hoover.org/research/better-approach-foreign-aid.

De Mesquita does not contend that U.S. foreign aid is a form of "empire building" intended to make recipient countries dependent on the U.S. or confer direct economic benefits to the U.S. (Even if the U.S. is driven by the possibility of indirect benefit from having more capitalistic countries on the world stage, along with a stable world order, that is something quite different from seeking an "empire").

IIRC, he claims that foreign aids directly help autocratic rulers stay in place, by giving them means to pay off their vital support. So he says that it clearly prevents uplifting people or teaching them democracy, since they are the first victims of dictatorship.

I'd go even further than that and say that foreign aid helps keep badly-run democratic governments stay in place (e.g. in Bangladesh). Being skeptical about whether foreign aid achieves the desired effect is very different than saying that the U.S. provides foreign aid for purposes of "empire building."

Breathtakingly ignorant? Wow. I have seen foreign aid in the third world and a lot of it is pretty self serving from the first world (including the US). Examples: US aid to fund a cure for malaria except they were only interested in solutions that would work as short term protection for the US military, not long term protection for the people actually suffering from chronic malaria. The WHO (in this case pushed by individual Americans) pushing locals to switch a national park over to mining interests resulting in multinationals coming in, screwing the environment and taking all the profits. I think your dad might have been viewing the world through ideological glasses.

>It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but by teaching them to live and govern themselves like we do.

That sort of comparison is going to only get you into trouble. Foreign aid is very often tied to foreign policy, especially security policies like maintaining bases, to keep "friendly" regimes in power, to "tied" aid, etc.

Certainly, not everything is Machiavellian about it, and ofcource people recognize the huge benefits and impact it has had in uplifting poor people, lets also not forget that there is a whole lotta grey in there.

So China is winning by giving out loans that will never be paid back?

Yes, because they take assets in lieu of payment. You don't get from 3rd world country to challenging the world super power in 20 years by being dumb.

On a related tangent, if you don't mind - I'm trying to test my "tone detector" - it indicated sarcasm in your comment, as if the comment to which you were replying was not just wrong but dumb - how accurate was I?

This is exactly what happened with the Hambantota Port. Sri Lanka asked for billions in loans from China to build a second port in Hambantota, Sri Lanka. After it was built, the naval port didn’t get any shipping/cargo traffic so Sri Lanka couldn’t pay back the Billions. China offered to refinance the loan, how? Sri Lanka turned over control of the port to the Chinese Government under a lease of 100 years and Sri Lanka gets to pay a lower amount on the loan.

Now US Intelligence are seeing an uptick in Chinese Navy Warships patrolling the Indian Ocean and fears about Hambantota turning into a Chinese Military Port.

This is being called the String of Pearls Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_of_Pearls_(Indian_Ocean...

The model has already happened in Djibouti, where a Chinese Military Port is currently operational. US Generals have voiced their concern: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-djibouti/signif...

Exactly.

It's odd how some people can clearly see (and acknowledge) these things, while others seem literally unable to see them, almost as if they have some sort of a psychological filter hiding portions of the full spectrum of reality. I wonder if I suffer from the same thing, but different portions of the spectrum. I find it an interesting and useful way in which to observe the world and disagreements between people.

It's kinda funny how Americans still thinks US is doing shit to help anyone else besides themselves and their business interests. China is now doing the same thing the west/ImF/world Bank have always done. But in the case of China they don't run around toppling government and the countries do get general infrastructure while the west usually just built the bare minimum to get the resources out. Yes its imperialism but I'd take the Chinese version over the horrors of the western Empire any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I think Chinese leadership have a different set of incentives than Americans do. American businesses are about minimizing production costs in order to sell as much as possible in the US market. While the Chinese government seems to prefer expanding the market for their domestic good by raising the stands of living in developing countries.

Similar to how the US handled Japan and South Korea instead of Latin America and the middle east.

> It's kinda funny how Americans still thinks US is doing shit to help anyone else besides themselves and their business interests.

It depends on what you mean by that statement I suppose. It sounds like you are of the opinion that literally every single foreign aid initiative the United States of America undertakes is, at it's core, entirely (not partially, as I would suspect the case to be, but entirely) for the purposes of advancing the interests of American businesses.

Is that a more or less proper characterization of what you've said, or have I misunderstood?

And if it is proper, how might you have come to know this? I mean, for the sake of argument let's assume it's true - if this what they were really up to, I'd think most of the corresponding proof would be known only to a fairly select group of trustworthy insiders. How would you have found out these details?

This story doesn't seem to add up, but maybe I'm missing something?

> China is now doing the same thing the west/ImF/world Bank have always done.

The exact same thing, or something similar?

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...

It's not the comment that's dumb, it's the strategy. The Soviet Union used to dump tons of money into client states, and all that Russia has to show for it now is a naval base in Syria. China has hundreds of millions of peasants who are living in abject poverty. Doesn't it have better uses for that money?

> It's not the comment that's dumb, it's the strategy.

Really? Based on what, the failure of the Soviet Union? If you were to look a little closer, you may discover the Chinese aren't executing an identical strategy. The world is extremely complex, using blunt comparisons like the above won't yield very accurate results. At the very least, you would probably benefit from having a more open mind.

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