Re:China’s Built a Railroad to Nowhere in Kenya
by AmericanChopper on Sunday July 21, 2019 @12:31AM
(#20489948)
I’ve worked with a number of companies in SEA who deal with these kinds of infrastructure projects, and there is quite widespread concern that China’s intention is just to set up a series of debt-traps that it can leverage to achieve further strategic goals. The terms China tends to seek in these deals are also quite predatory. There’s little doubt who’s benefitting the most out of them, especially considering the ways China aggressively minimises their own downsides. This is a topic that has been written on quite extensively, and is likely the primary reason that Japan is outperforming China in SEA infrastructure investments.
If any of these countries do start to struggle paying back this debt, I’m sure there will be some bureaucrat stressing over it in his office in Beijing. That tends to be how the accountability model works in central planning committees. But China is acting a lot like a loan shark in most of these deals, and any default just means they get to exert their influence in other strategically meaningful ways.
It’s also very easy to see how all of this makes perfect sense to China. A lot of their internal mega-projects are starting to flop. Deals like this keep parts of their constructing industry busy, while transferring all the risk to ill-prepared developing nations.
I'd say no. I've been personally involved with now 4 companies that were directly or indirectly involved in all that OBOR kerfuffle.
It was certainly a genuine miscalculation on Chinese side, and a very grave one.
An average Chinese bureaucrat knows no more of the outside world than a lifelong gated community dweller knows of "the hood." And add to that the natural incompetence of China's "aristocrat-bureaucrat" class.
In talks with many members of political establishment, I heard very much the same sentiment: many genuinely expected OBOR to be "a walk in the park." To a lot of them, their first first hand experience working outside of China is a complete eye opener.
The common line they thought was that "if Kenya's GDP is zillion times smaller than ours, then we can put zillion times less money on an equivalent project, and still get the same result."
Another one after that is "if it is so much cheaper than in China, it must be very easy."
Some times they get messed up with analogies beyond silly, like in the case of one OBOR official who was estimating costs of road projects in Africa by trying to find physically similar roads in China, and copypasting their costing.
A lot of things in China are done with presumption: "if it's abroad, it can't be worse than in China." That presumption is just so wrong.