Someone watch this and lemme know how much is pure western c o p e.
His thesis is that the BRI is failing because China isn’t directly profiting off of it. Especially in the last few years, the international economy has downturned and the Chinese government has bailed out a lot of its partners either through currency exchanges or straight up forgiving loans. This ignores the fact that the goal of the BRI was never to make money by loaning it to other countries - it’s like saying that the US Navy is a failure because we don’t literally plunder enemy ships with it (except when we do lmao).
I am not going to watch the video, but there is a half truth to this. Because of the slowdown of the economy, particularly in the developing world, due to COVID, they had to write off larger amounts of debt than they expected. This isn’t a problem because they wanted profits directly from it, but that the original ambition was to continue this process by taking the money from the repayments and use that to give out more loans for development. So China had to take the losses from writing off debts and that has slowed down and scaled back some of the ambitions of BRI.
