100%. This is a standard item from the imperial-power playbook. The author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" documented it pretty well.

The basic rundown is that a country sets up international financing institutions, then loans money for infrastructure projects to less developed countries. This is supposed to be spent to hire engineering and construction companies from the lending country, with the promise that your companies will help up-skill the host countries favored companies, which may or may not happen.

The effect of this is that you basically use someone else's money to build up companies and build expertise that you can continue to sell around the world.

Its an obviously great business practice, but very prone to corruption, and ineffective at creating real economic growth in the host country (which is go-to cover story for why its not imperial aggression). The Belt and Road Initiative is basically just this exact strategy writ large.

Yanis Varoufakis has an interesting take on Chinese economic imperialism. According to him, the Chinese are a benevolent imprealist, trying to achieve the same dominance but with loans rather than guns.

It's interesting to consider it benevolent from his perspective, since he called German financial institutions malevolent when it played out very similar in Greece. Except geopolitical influence expansion was not a main goal.

Maybe he said something like "it looks like benevolent, because they use finance instead of guns" or that compared to using military force it's relatively benevolent, but after watching some of his talks, I highly doubt he'd call it a generous ethical policy.

Is Varoufakis someone that should generally be taken that seriously? The last time I heard about him was during the election for the European Parliament, where he was pushing DiEM25, which seemes like a rather idealistic (in the unrealistic sense) movement full of attention-hungry personalities.

Varoufakis' comment on China isn't about China per se but rather an extension of his economic criticism of financial capitalism. He views China as patient investors looking for long term returns from infrastructure projects instead of short term returns from financial speculation, and he believes the former is "far more humanistic" than the latter. He even gave an example when he was the finance minister: He renegotiated a better deal for the port with China, but the deal was blocked by the Troika. It's not a comparison between finance vs guns, as we all learned after 2008 that finance can be as destructive as guns.

>According to him, the Chinese are a benevolent imprealist,

Yellow man's burden?

At least China didn't send troops to other countries to arrest the president...if you call that parallel, well, that's a really skewed parallel.