Which country’s values do you prefer influencing the developing world: China’s, or the United States’?
It is also not quite right to treat the Chinese government as a single minded monolith in determining their own policies. There is tons of internal factions and divisions within their own political system. Yeah sure certainly Xi has a lot of power, but only so long as he doesn't try to buck off the opinions and ideals over the rest of their political class, a political class who holds many of the same opinions and ideas as the US political class. The political sphere in China today is nothing near what it was 50 years ago.
The US has two and it's hard for other countries to discern any difference between them.
otherwise, they are seemingly the same in terms of outcomes for average workers.
Developing nations will take the support they can get - just ask the predatory lenders who've been dicking them over for hundreds of years. Values don't really come into it, unfortunately.
https://www.rferl.org/a/montenegro-chinese-highway-debt-cont...
Then it sounds like the problem isn't 'who has money', it sounds like we need to scrap the economic system. What do you propose we replace it with?
It's rather, which would you rather the developing world be exploited by, US or China?
We have pretty extensive track record of developing countries being exploited by western economies. And it aint pretty. So the best case you can make for the US is thay familiar devil is better because it's familiar.
The lack of realpolitik in this thread is astounding. We don’t live in a perfect world, where economies of real people in countries that need roads and telecom get to say “No thank you, your country’s history is gross.”
Belt and Road is a massive soft power grab by an autocratic dictatorship. That has enormous implications in geopolitics. China is about to collapse because it’s in a demographic tailspin. What happens to these initiatives — and those countries that depend on them - is a huge open question and risk.
I'm sure Chinese citizen could have said exactly the same.
> My stable, democratic country.
And follow it by his own set of nice sounding (to him) words. Everybody is a good person with good intentions in their own judgement.
Besides, US is not really a democratic country. You don't get a democracy if you just split one party system into two halves that play cooperative hot potato game with who's the current face of the power. What laws US lives by are dictated solely by the wealthy and both halves serve them equally efficiently at the tremendous cost to society and environment. China does pretty much the same only it didn't come up yet with the idea of having mock fights every few years to improve the stability of power.
> China is about to collapse because it’s in a demographic tailspin. What happens to these initiatives — and those countries that depend on them - is a huge open question and risk.
When a lender collapses it's usually very good news for the debtor.
It would stand to reason that this is statistically likely, but I don’t think anyone has any real understanding of how much the people in China believe in / support their current government and its positions. Information is extremely restricted.
> When a lender collapses it's usually very good news for the debtor.
I could see why someone would think this if they’re considering the collateral is something like a house, or a car, or a plot of land — something that is useful in and of itself because it is surrounded by other stable infrastructure. However, in the case we’re talking about here, China is the lender for large scale infrastructure that will stop getting built and eventually decay because the borrowers have no means of finishing or maintaining what was being built. That makes them vulnerable in other ways.
Keep in mind, too, that those places where the infrastructure will stop being maintained are also places that make or mine or otherwise export components that are part of a global supply chain.
You don’t have to love America’s values like I do to be biased towards the US being the driving influence in these nations.
Realpolitik arguments have the other problem, where they rely on hope that whatever's good for the elites that call the shots will eventually trickle down to the rest of us.
There is certainly truth to it (A lot more truth than to trickle-down nonsense in domestic economics), but the track record for it is still... Mixed.
Also, if China collapsing over demographics is a real concern, what about democracy in the US collapsing? Is that not a real concern in this decade? Is it normal for democratic countries to have a loser who pulls every stop to try to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, or for an eleventh hour beer gut putsch to invade its capitol, causing its government to shelter in closets? Or for one of it's two ruling parties focus more on waging culture war on the other, than on governing? Or for the frankly insane effort going into winner-wins-more systems of gerrymandering, voter suppression at polling stations, etc..?