https://dianefrancis.substack.com/
On October 17, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) celebrated its tenth anniversary with great fanfare in Beijing. Vladimir Putin and the head of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime attended, along with leaders from 130 countries.
There were speeches and banquets to celebrate President Xi Jinping’s flagship initiative. He delivered a grand speech and claimed huge success, but numbers tell a different story. Another gigantic Chinese real estate conglomerate last week filed for bankruptcy in a Hong Kong court. The economy is slowly tanking, sinking under massive real estate and government debts. (See my Beijing’s Bubble Bursts, Part 1 and Part 2.)
When Xi launched BRI in 2013, China’s economic growth was double digit and Xi created BRI in order to make China a geopolitical superpower and upend America’s domination. Beijing signed deals with countries and financed the building of massive infrastructure projects.
Currently, a trillion dollars’ worth of IOUs are owed by most of the countries whose leaders that were in attendance at the celebration — debts that may never be paid. Recently, Foreign Policy sneered about Xi’s debacle and labelled it the “Belt and Road to Nowhere”.
For the rest of this article: https://dianefrancis.substack.com/p/beijings-bubble-bursts-part-3?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=257546&post_id=141307427&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=ok09p&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email