You won't find a neutral in-depth analysis of the project in Bloomberg (or FT, Economist,etc) as a substantial amount of stories about China are "wishful thinking" meant to be "self fulfilling prophecies" by influencing investors [1]. I mean mostly against China.
[1] David Fickling stories - see the ones about China. https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AQrSL0m_2u4/david-fickling
Every media outlet has an undisclosed interest somewhere or at the very least a heavy bias sometimes. And it's highlighted more than ever when those trusted pillars of reporting like Bloomberg, FT, or the Economist come up with conflicting information.
Right now CCTV in China or RT in Russia are saying the same thing about the US, or the EU, or Japan, or Korea. And the people reading and listening are having the same discussion we're having just with different conclusions based on that trusted information.
It is possible to call bubbles, especially if they are as large and data is transparently available. It is really hard to tell the moment when it will pop, especially if it is connected with the government like in the soviet union or in China.
So when you're playing close to home positive stuff gets the fanfare, negative predictions are underplayed. You're talking about your own market after all. Why do you think it's so easy for these publications to hit at anything that's not domestic? The further away, the less friendly the player, the more scathing the prediction.
You won't find them because these aren't projects being developed (a) with private capital nor (b) for their economic merits. When a bridge is built in America, someone issues a bond. That issuance--both leading up to it and once in the wild--produces an incentive to do good analysis.
That incentive isn't there with Belt and Road. State-owned banks provide the capital. And the reasoning for the development is strategic, so you get geopolitical and military talking heads instead of good economists, whose services are ironically better allocated to analyzing other projects.
> Failed projects like Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port may indeed be a way for China to quietly extend its strategic power around the world.
For me, this narrative seems to be very typical of our European/American mindset. All great infrastructure plans are grandiose planning, we're done growing, we're 2 years away from the next crisis and so forth and projecting it onto China, which seems to have shaken off that very prediction over and over. China's current mode of development does not comply with our 'End of History' like narrative about how countries ought to develop, so we're stuck in a constant loop of shallow pessimistic analogies.
I would want to see an in-depth analysis of the project really looking at the consequences with an eye on the long-term effects rather than just stories about some harbor in Africa falling short of expectations. This is not illuminating.