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What you are calling monoculture is somewhere around 1/6th population of the world. If you take into the account the inroads that China has made into Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe we might be seeing ourselves entering another phase of the cold war.

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Those inroads are disintegrating.

The quality of the deliverables hasn’t been great, they have been poorly managed and have left many countries either in significant debt or with onerous obligations.

That's the problem with state-driven investment. Most people are lazy and/or greedy, and given a known state-sponsored payday, have no incentive to deliver quality.

So even if the Chinese state may want the projects to go well, the conduit by which the projects are funded and managed doesn't have much more than shame and prison as sticks, and that's only for people who are caught.

I worry that you're right about this. I've been saying for a while now that I expect Africa to be a continent on which the US and China wage a new cold war

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