It Could Happen Here - The Chinese Economy Demystified: What is Belt and Road?

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Mia walks through the components of China's Belt and Road Intuitive, its origins in efforts to resuscitate a flailing Chinese economy, and what both liberal and radical accounts get wrong about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm your host, Mia Wong. Now, if you've been reading the news about China at all in the past few years, you've probably at least heard of China's Belt and Road Initiative, probably followed by a stream of almost panicked fear-mongering about China displacing America's role in the world and luring countries into debt traps that allow the CCP to seize control of the country's assets and then its entire foreign policy. And all of this begs the question, what actually is Belt and Road? This is not a simple question, because Belt and Road? This is not a simple question because Belt and Road isn't really a coherent single project at all. It is effectively a marketing term slapped onto an enormous array

of loans, investments, some things that are effectively grants, infrastructure projects, and special economic zones across the world. The money for these projects comes from a variety of Chinese banks and sometimes just like government agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and involve a vast array of different Chinese companies and contractors. So what are these banks and companies and governments actually up to? I'm going to run through three examples to get a sense of the kind of program that composes Belt

and Road. One very common program is extending lines of credit to state oil companies of oil producers in order to secure China's supply of oil. I'm starting here because this is not typically what people think of when someone brings up Belt and Road. And it gets at a couple of the central complexities of Belt and Road. One is, you know, a lot of this stuff is just in some sense, almost banal attempts to just sort of secure natural resources by paying money for them and investing money in them, which is very, very standard sort of capitalist behavior. But another complexity of this aspect of Belt and Road is that these loans to oil producers were happening well before Belt and Road ever existed. The credit lines were simply absorbed into Belt and Road when the project was announced in 2013,

and now these loans are considered Belt and Road projects. This is a very common trend in Belt and Road. Much of the vaunted $1 trillion of investment in Belt and Road projects comes from, you know, the extension of pre-existing projects, which really sort of puts into perspective all of those like very, very scary like maps that you'll see where they're like a hundred blah, blah, blah countries have accepted Belt and Road projects. It's like, well, yeah, okay. Like how much of that's new and how much of that is people who had like some random agreement with China beforehand. had like some random agreement with China beforehand.

Now, let, lest you think the fact that China is giving like, you know, a bunch of money to like Brazil state oil company means that like this whole belt and road thing has something to do with socialism. Here's a quote from China's 13th five-year plan quote, we will speed up efforts to implement the free trade area strategy, gradually establishing a network of high standard free trade areas. We will actively engage in

negotiations with other countries and regions along the route of the Belt and Road Initiative on the building of free trade areas. Now, this is the ancient neoliberal dream. It is a dream of a world where corporations can freely move their commodities across borders while maintaining zones of just unlimited exploitation of workers and special economic zones. Now, speaking of sort of the condition of workers, let us move to a more typical Belt and Road project, Jamaica's North-South Highway. In 2014, at the astounding cost of $700 million, the Jamaican government opened the North-South Highway. Here's from an article that was republished in Laosan.

Here's from an article that was republished in Laosan. Quote, since Jamaica needed a Chinese loan to finance the highway, Chinese Harbor Engineering Company was granted the right to own and operate the highway for 50 years as part of the arrangement. Also, the tolls collected on the highway cannot be used for debt servicing and rather go to the China Harbor Engineering Company directly as profit. Additionally, the tolls are astronomical by local standards. To drive the length of the highway in a standard car costs the equivalence of over $12 each way. This is well out of reach for the vast majority of Jamaicans, where the average monthly salary is about $600 and only 60% of workers have a wage or salaried position at all. Many of my respondents wondered, for whom was this highway? The answer may lie in the additional concessions granted to the China Harbor Engineering Company. Primarily, 1,200 acres of land across the

highway to be held in perpetuity. Apparently, this will be used to construct hotels and adjoining infrastructure by Chinese companies for Chinese tourists, a kind of economic enclave from which locals would not benefit directly, as acknowledged by the then Jamaican Minister of Transport. Now, this sucks for Jamaican workers who didn't get any of the money from the contract, which went to Chinese firms that imported Chinese workers. And it's also not a great deal for the Jamaican government, which is an enormous amount of debt and gets seemingly very little for this. And this begs the question, why do countries agree to this? Now, the short answer is that they need money for development projects.

And, you know, for a poor country, that money is very hard to come by. country, that money is very hard to come by. Part of the popularity of the project is that economies who've been through the just devastating process of IMF structure reforms, who've had literally their entire economy and social system torn apart, who have literally watched food being taken from the mouths of their children in order to pay off IMF loans, are looking for literally any alternative. And as we've discussed on this show before, Jamaica itself was the first country to be looted by the IMF as the social democratic government was forced to shred its welfare state and its economy in the 70s as a condition for getting IMF loans. This history and the current day threat

of more of these structural adjustments, should you attempt to go to the IMF for more loans, make it more likely that countries will turn to Belt and Road rather than the IMF to deal with their complete lack of development and to stave off economic crises resulting from the fact that their government has completely run out of money. And this is something even liberal imperialist institutions will admit. Here's from the Council on Foreign Relations Belt and Road Task Force report. In contrast to loans from traditional providers of development finance, China's loans are generally not concessional, and the Chinese Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China expect to make a return on their investments. The loans also lack policy

conditionality. They contain few or no exceptions of host country economic policy or political reforms. Now, the Council on Foreign Relations concludes this with a very slick line that goes, quote, for many Belt and Road Initiative countries, especially authoritarian regimes, this is an attractive package, especially compared with other lenders who insist on reforms tied to loans. Now, okay, when you hear the words, you know, when you hear that authoritarian regimes don't want to do the quote reforms tied to loans, that makes it sounds like the quote unquote reforms are like, you know, you dictators cede power to a democracy. is not how IMF loan conditions work. What those reforms actually entail is much closer to sell every state-owned asset in the country to a bunch of American investors and we will leave your children to die.

Now, you know, and this leads into some other stuff that the Council on Foreign Relations talks about a lot, which is, you know, they have entire giant sessions about corruption on Belt and Road programs to which, you know, they have entire giant sessions about corruption on Belt and Road programs to which, you know, the immediate response is like, man, do you know how much money the IMF gave Pinochet? They gave him over a billion dollars in 1980s money. That is like three billion dollars in today's money. Now, hilariously, the other people who gave Pinochet a boatload of money was the Chinese Communist Party. Although, you know, orders in magnitude less because this is

like the 70s Chinese Communist Party who do not have much money, but they had enough money apparently to give a bunch of it to Pinochet. And it's at this point that I want to remind everyone that China is the third largest voting member of the IMF, which is a real issue for both the sort of liberal and pro-CCP accounts of the conflict between the CCP and the IMF over providing loans. Because, you know, contrary to the way both of these groups seem to think about sort of the modern capitalist economy, China is not a, you know, an old communist radical, like throwing stones at the liberal order from outside the house. They are part of the global financial institutions. And to the extent that like,

you know, China can be fighting an institution that it is also a part of, right? To the extent that that even makes sense to talk about, what you're really talking about is just intercapitalist competition over who gets to give people loans. Now, there's other interesting stuff in this report, like an admission that the Chinese, you know, the sort of Chinese debt trap narrative is overblown. And this is true. The sort of like case study in about like a Chinese company taking a port in Sri Lanka is not it's not exactly like the story that everyone thinks it is. And, you know, like the Chinese company like got the port after like a bidding process and stuff. So, you know, and this is true.

And the fact that it's been used sort of like hyped up to do fear mongering is absolutely true. The thing the Council on Foreign Relations can't actually sort of say is that the actual conclusion that you get if you look closely at sort of this combination of, you know, a country like Sri Lanka that has both IMF loans and like loans from China is that all of the lenders in the global capitalist economy absolutely suck. And they all exploit the working class of the debtor countries like in their own ways. Do you know who else exploits the working class of debtor countries? It is the products and services that support this podcast. more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real,

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available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things Thank you. the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And we're back. Now, what is notable about Belt and Road is that Belt and Road's infrastructure projects usually do actually get built. But for all of the sort of screaming about like China's geopolitical expansion, its attempt to subvert the democratic order, the actual reason

why these projects, unlike, you know, so many other large scale development projects actually happen and, you know, actually do get built is much more banal. It is a product of internal Chinese economics. So to explain this, I'm going to turn to another example of a type of Belt and Road project. Giving countries loans to buy telecommunications and internet equipment from Chinese companies. Here's from fizz.org. China's demand for infrastructure, including communications and internet gear, is not as high as it used to be, said Chinese Development Bank President Zhang Zhijie. So what can we do with the excess production capacity? We can only send it abroad.

We may give you loans to buy Chinese equipment or materials, but there must be a Chinese element, Zhang told AFP of his bank's loans to help Chinese firms abroad. Now, this is an interesting quote for a number of reasons. Recent sort of American and also Canadian, the Canadians went wild over this. Concern around Chinese telecom companies have, you know, argue that the spread of Chinese communication technology is like a geopolitical power grab by the CCP. The Chinese Development Bank, however, kind of like lets the actual game slip, which is that the reason for these loans and a major impetus

for the sort of broader Belt and Road Initiative is finding a solution to Chinese production overcapacity, which is the giant structural problem, which sort of hangs like the doom of Damocles over the Chinese economy. And this is incredibly important. Foreign policy analysts have a tendency, which is replicated in the media, to think about Belt and Road as fundamentally a geopolitical tool. Take, for example, this line from foreign policy, quote,

Take, for example, this line from Foreign Policy Quote Well, the developing world fall under China's sway Many policymakers in Washington, D.C. certainly fear so Which is one of the reasons they have created the new International Development Finance Corporation Which is slated to begin operating at the end of this year Like the Marshall Plan, which in post-World War II years used generous economic aid To fight the appeal of Soviet communism in Western Europe. The International Development Finance Corporation

aims to help Washington push back against Beijing's sweeping Belt and Road Initiative. Now, fascinatingly, the authors don't seem to understand what the Marshall Plan actually was. Now, the Marshall Plan, you know, despite what you will like probably read in sort of like mainstream, like diplomatic histories, was not like, originally was not really driven by anti-communism at all. It was in large part,

a product of massive industrial overcapacity in the post-war US, particularly in the automotive sector. Demand from the domestic American market couldn't support the enormously expanded auto industry's industrial capacity. And so the auto industry went to Congress and tried to get them to rebuild Europe as like, you know, another market that they could sell their, you know, that they could sell cars to that could absorb

the product of their capacity the only way they could actually get this to work was to tie it to a raft of anti-communism and this is now how the project is remembered as this you know as this sort of like grand anti-communist like political strategy you know and and in this sense belton road can be understood as China's Marshall Plan. It is a bold attempt to forge an international solution to its domestic economic problems. And this means to actually understand what Belt and Road is, we need to go back to the beginning. In response to the financial collapse of 2008, China carried out what was, until COVID, the largest stimulus in human history, an incomprehensibly large Keynesian program focused on internal infrastructure development designed to shock the Chinese economy back into shape. And it worked for about one year.

In 2010, the Chinese economy hit 10% year-on-year GDP growth, and it has been falling ever since. show where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to post run high on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome.

I'm Danny thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by I heartart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. In 2011, the round of global uprisings kicked off by the Arab Spring hit China in the form

of the Wukong riots and a wave of strikes. And by 2013, a year into the first term of new Chinese President Xi Jinping, the economy was doing terribly and the government was still not out of the woods politically either. In response, the government announced two programs within about four months of each other, Belt and Road and the so-called Ministimulus, another Chinese stimulus package aimed at improving Chinese rail, is that the proper term for it? It ended improving the Chinese train network. Now, these two programs were effectively the same response to the economic crisis faced by the CCP. Rising wages and strike activity and later environmental protests were threatening the profitability of the Chinese manufacturing sector in its traditional crisis faced by the CCP. Rising wages and strike activity, and later environmental protests,

were threatening the profitability of the Chinese manufacturing sector in its traditional coastal urban sectors like Shenzhen. The solution, then, was to move Chinese capital towards the interior of the country into more rural areas with lower wages, and then build an infrastructure network to export Chinese commodities abroad. This move served several purposes at the same time. On the one hand, cheaper rural workers were less likely to organize either strikes or environmental protests. On the other hand, some kind of rural investment could secure rural factional support for the party at a time when the rural wukan riots

meant that such support was anything but assured but even in 2013 it was clear that the vaunted chinese transition to a consumer economy was going to fail because and this is this is really blindingly obvious if you think if you think about how the chinese economy works for like 10 seconds okay in order to have a consumer economy you must have a class of consumers now this requires average people to have a thing called money and both xi jinping and the chinese capitalist class more broadly just absolutely resolutely refuse to do anything that like involves paying chinese workers more which is what you need to make this happen and they just refuse to do it it is genuinely stunning xi jinping xi jinping would literally rather force like force the force the randomly the head like the ceos of corporations to give money to charity and call

it a government program before he would he would like fucking raise a minimum wage so you know if you're in 2013 right you can see the writing on the wall you can see the chinese economy isn't going to like turn into a consumer economy there's been you know there's been some transition transition into a service-based economy, but ask the US how gross that a service-based economy works for you. And because they've seen the writing on the wall, Chinese capitalists start looking for ways

to make money overseas. And this overlaps with a growing demand to do something with the enormous reserves of American dollars that China has from like basically propping up the US economy by buying like a trillion dollars of US bonds in the 2000s and early 2010s. And like, you think I'm joking when I say like a trillion dollars, but it is actually around a trillion dollars. Well, okay. This is where I need to make an enormous disclaimer. Oh, boy. OK.

It is atrociously difficult to get reliable economic statistics out of China to the point where, like, the Chinese central government, when they get data from their own provinces who are legally required to report data to them, provinces who are legally required to report data to them. They have to mess with the data to make it make literally any sense at all. They have these equations that they apply to the statistical data from the

provinces they get that are effectively attempts to calculate how much the provinces are lying to the central government and how, you know, try to figure out a way to fix it. And, you know, they they are doing things they are doing things like they're doing things out of like the old late soviet union they are they are they are using satellite pictures to check how much light there is from factories at night they are like measuring how many freight trains are like going into a province and trying

to use that to estimate their actual industrial capacity it is wild and that is just the ccp trying to figure out its own numbers and that means right that the that the numbers the CCP actually decides to release when they're done trying to get the data to look kind of real so they can understand what's going on in their own economy. You know, so there's that data, which is unreliable because, again, like you're dealing with everyone just lying to you about what the data is. But the data the CCP actually releases. Oh, boy. So so we're gonna come back to this in a little bit but uh chinese youth unemployment right now is 20 and the ccp's response to this is they've announced that they refuse to release any more youth unemployment numbers until they finish like recalculating it or something so great stuff amazing stuff happening in the world of Chinese statistical annexes. It is awful.

I don't wish this on anyone. Yeah, now all of this is to say that the case I'm about to make is probably true. Like there's like a 90% chance that what I'm about to say is true, but we don't 100% know because it relies on Chinese economic data that is incredibly sketchy. And a lot of this has turned into this sort of like game of like bonds i was talking about earlier of that you know were moved from the people's bank of china which is china central bank to like other banks and then those banks use that to do investments and this appears to be some of the money that was used to fund belt and road projects and this is where things get very sketchy. Now, these banks seem to initially have been flush with capital, which contributed to a massive – as the product is initially starting and up through about 2018, it just keeps – the amount of money going into this keeps increasing, keeps increasing. And then in 2018, it starts to slow.

slow and then after the pandemic and particularly after like 2021 2022 like the amount of money that's going into belt and road projects has imploded and the amount of loans that the ccp is writing off has just diminished enormously now okay this is the sketchy part. You will see a lot of people, if you look into this, who are going to argue that the reason that these loans have sort of dried up and the reason that this has been decreasing is that China is like burning through its reserve of foreign exchange. Like it's burning out of – it's burning through its reserve of like us dollars that it has in its banks. This may be true. Maybe it's probably not true of like 2018 because, and this is the thing that's been discovered very recently. Um, a lot of Chinese was like a lot of things that, that like a technically foreign exchange reserves were like technically aren't

qualified, classified as foreign exchange reserves because they've been weird stuff has happened to the balance sheet. I know it's kind of a mess, but like it seems like China has way, way larger. They have these things called shadow reserves that are the things that they've been using to like turn Forex into like investments and this this seems this seems to indicate that china has like way way larger foreign exchange reserves than it technically are on the balance sheet so what the actual relationship between how much foreign exchange reserves china has and how much money is putting into belton road we don't know's a disaster. But what we do know is that these investments were not like sort of like mere geopolitical tools, right? These investments were actually designed to make money. And that means that they were and still are an

attempt to solve sort of the weakness of the Chinese economy by finding ways to invest capital with better returns than the absolutely terrible and increasingly dog shit rates that you can find in China. And this is something that we've been seeing, you know, in the last year, we've been watching sort of the dogs come, like the chickens come home to roost for the Chinese economy. We're like, you know, all this debt buildups paying off. Well, I say paying off all this debt buildup is, you know, like really starting to damage the economy. Like the housing market's kind of imploding. And, you know, Belt and Road was supposed to be sort of the answer to this, right?

If you combine the fact that we know for a fact that these loans are an attempt to actually generate returns, and we also know that these loans are a way to sort of stimulate demand for Chinese goods that there's no domestic market for, we get this clear picture of what's really driving Belt and Road. It's the crisis of Chinese capital, which in and of itself is just sort of a reflection of the global crisis of overproduction and underconsumption that's haunted the world since the 1970s. Now, there's one last aspect of Belt and Road that we need to talk about that gets way less attention than any other aspect of the initiative. Belt and Road also acts as a work program for a very specific kind of Chinese worker. Belt and Road projects, as you see in Jamaica, are run by Chinese corporations almost always. I mean,

occasionally other firms get contracted, but mostly it's Chinese corporations. And they import Chinese workers to do the work. And we've looked at it from the Jamaican end, where Jamaican workers are getting screwed out of jobs and wages. But we should also look at it from the perspective of Chinese workers as well. Working in China, as we've discussed elsewhere extensively, sucks ass. Wages are dog shit, the hours are inhuman, and there's intense competition for what jobs do exist. On the other hand, salaries for Chinese workers on built-in road projects are much, much higher than they are for the same job in China. Amazingly, Chinese corporations abroad actually have less ability to just not pay people

for their work, which is, you know, the thing that, you know, usually the first thing that rich people try to do when they are faced with having to pay someone. And Chinese corporations absolutely constantly attempt to just not pay their workers. And as a bonus to that, on top of the fact that you're like actually getting paid and you're getting paid way more than you would for working a job in China, these belt and road jobs have a much faster promotion

track and the cost of living is much lower than it is in China, which allows workers to save money and send remittances back home. This means that belt and road jobs, which are specifically in sort of like nationalist circles conceptualized as quote Africa, which is, oh boy, is seen as, but it's seen as a way out for Chinese workers. And we actually talked about this a long

time ago in our lying flat anti-work episodes. Part of the origins of lying flat was his reaction to this sort of like nationalist discourse, but like finding your own personal Africa to break out of like Chinese involution. And, you know, from this kind of like ultra-nationalist, like really racist, like concept, you get this like left-wing backlash, a co-opting of like the refusal to work that is, you know, lying flat. But for our purposes right now, the important thing about this is Belt and Road was a solution to a sort of new, like highly educated Chinese working class who, you know, were suddenly realizing that like this education that they'd put literally everything into and this like

they'd sunk their entire lives into was just going to get them nowhere. everything into and this like they sunk their entire lives into was just going to get them nowhere and you know belton road appeared as a sort of mirage of a way out but it's not it's not a way out for chinese workers it's it's its own kind of imperialism it's the same sort of shit that oil companies do where they said highly paid american workers to oil wells in nigeria to avoid having to deal with a class of skilled and politically sophisticated Nigerian oil workers. It's the same kind of racial divide and conquer that funds Chinese workers at the expense of workers in Jamaica. And that ultimately is the core of both Belt and Road and the American response to Belt and Road.

It is a desperate attempt to keep the embers of capital burning by lighting the working class on fire and feeding it to the flames. Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for no tales from the shadow. Join me, Danny trails and step into the flames of right.

An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso

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