ROME, July 23 (Reuters) - Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who will visit the White House on Thursday, said that U.S. President Joe Biden had never challenged her on the issue of Rome being part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Meloni leads the only major Western country to have joined China’s BRI scheme, which envisions rebuilding the old Silk Road to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond with large infrastructure spending.
The Western critique of the BRI is that it’s debt trap diplomacy, i.e. China loans money for development and hopes the beneficiaries can’t repay so they can “own” them in a diplomatic sense, or downright repo some of their critical assets.
That’s the criticism that Trump has levied against the BRI, but there are serious objections to this portrayal. Here’s one from a reputable Western source:
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/08/debunking-myth-debt-trap-diplomacy
Thanks for this link! I read the bullet points ('cuz it’s really late right now) but I’m keen on watching the video tomorrow!
It’s difficult for me to take anything Trump, and by extension, the U.S. says too seriously. They love to fearmonger about foreign influences and propaganda, but it’s not like they don’t do the very same they accuse others of.
Specifically, the GOP fearmongers most. The Dems are much more internationally & diplomatically inclined when compared to their political opponents.
Tinfoil Hat Time: I think the separatism in the US is being stoked by outside forces. If you read a summary of The Foundations of Geopolitics it sounds very familiar to what’s happening. I also think Social Media needs to go, or rather engagement driven algorithms, because they create informational bubbles that polarize society.
Thank you. It is absolutely being stoked by outside forces, very often on social media.
Random interns are using ChatGPT to excel in their jobs, no doubt the CCP and Kremlin have their own LLMs on social media dividing democratic countries.
One of the big downsides of free, anonymous speech.
They do the same, perhaps. But if the truth comes out in the States it’s a scandal.
If it comes out in China it’s a massacre.
Does it matter if it’s a scandal or not when there are no repercussions? Are there not still concentration camps along the southern border? A plan that openly boasted about sexually assaulting people was elected president, and is still not in prison.
China has done some heinous things, but let’s not pretend that the US hasn’t. Even for historical events that are being taught (like the trail of tears) the context is removed. Some things, like the Tulsa massacre aren’t mentioned at all. It’s said that slavery ended with the civil war, yet the last slave was freed in 1942 because the government at the time knew that their treatment of black people would be used as a point of entry for anti-American propaganda.
They have repeatedly intervened in foreign governments and even executed coups to overthrow governments. Like the 1953 coup to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran because he wanted to nationalise their oil industry.
As for social issues, women aren’t guaranteed access to abortion since the overthrowing of Roe v Wade the other year. Trans people don’t have access to life saving healthcare in most states. Prisoners are essentially stripped of human rights and forced into peonage, most prisoners also strangely being minorities/people of colour.
The United States aren’t good guys. If I have to tolerate their antics, which by and large happen to set the tone for politics here in Europe, then I can tolerate China as well.
Lol, going to need a source on that 1942 claim.
A Reputable source.
Oh absolutely. Here’s an archive.gov page on Classification 50 which is needed for context.
Unfortunately, it seems that the related documents aren’t filed online yet, it is mirrored on this wiki, and there are sources in the description. If you’re in the U.S. I’m sure you could head to a library and request this memo in person if you doubt its veracity.
In short, quote from the archive.gov page
This was done to end the convict leasing debt peonage system that used black codes, laws that specifically targeted black people. When a black person was caught doing heinous acts like playing dice, drinking alcohol, or talking too loudly near a white woman, they’d be arrested, tried, and convicted.
This was after the civil war, meaning that while the legal status of being a slave had been abolished, chattel slavery was not. You could buy the labour of a convict. So if you create laws that specifically target black people, and convict people en masse, you end up with slavery. That is what FDR’s government recognised, hence Circular no 3591 was put in place to end it, because they were worried that the enemy would use this in a propaganda war against them.
Here is a page from the Brownsville Herald (Texas) from October 2nd, 1942.
There’s also Mae Louise Miller who purports that she and her family were held in peonage (read: slavery) until they were freed in 1961. That’s her personal account though, so take that as you will.
I wonder why then, if it’s a debt trap, China has such a better record of forgiving foreign loans than other countries and institutions? The IMF requires economic control for their loans, including such stipulations as the privatization of public infrastructure, dismantling of labor laws, and lowering of minimum wages in their loans on a regular basis. I’ve not heard of any such requirements from Chinese loans, and in fact billions of dollars of loans were forgiven during the Covid-19 crisis. Why is there no criticism of the IMF loan regime and its fundamentally exploitative loans? The whole criticism reeks of orientalist hysteria to me.
Forgiving loans is soft power. That’s the simple answer.