If you make a deal with the devil, you’re likely to get burned.
Not only have several developing countries found themselves burdened with debt they took out to build infrastructure as part of a Chinese project; it turns out the CCP-funded infrastructure is already falling apart.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, a number of projects financed by the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are beset with flaws such as bad cabling, defective fire extinguishing systems, cracked walls, moldy ceilings, and overall sloppy construction.
At one project, the $2.7 billion Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant in Ecuador, rampant defects have led engineer Fabricio Yépez to worry that “We could lose everything. And we don’t know if it could be tomorrow or in six months.”
René Ortiz, Ecuador’s former energy minister and ex-secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), chimed in that “We are suffering today because of the bad quality of equipment and parts.”
Similar concerns have sprung up at the Chinese-built Isimba Hydro Power Plant in Uganda, social housing projects in Angola, and various other locations.
China has already spent over $1 trillion to build infrastructure around the world as part of BRI, which detractors claim is nothing more than a scheme to get poor nations hopelessly in debt to them (apparently to build them infrastructure that doesn’t even work) and further their global influence.
Chinese President Xi Jinping launched BRI with the aim of it being something of a modern Silk Road, allowing Beijing to become the center of world commerce and thereby supplant the United States.
The globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has written extensively on BRI, described Xi’s aims in the following terms:
Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings, both westward—through the mountainous former Soviet republics—and southward, to Pakistan, India, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Such a network would expand the international use of Chinese currency, the renminbi, and “break the bottleneck in Asian connectivity,” according to Xi. (The Asian Development Bank estimated that the region faces a yearly infrastructure financing shortfall of nearly $800 billion.) In addition to physical infrastructure, China plans to build fifty special economic zones, modeled after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which China launched in 1980 during its economic reforms under leader Deng Xiaoping.
…China’s overall ambition for the BRI is staggering. To date, more than sixty countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so. Analysts estimate the largest so far to be the estimated $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of projects connecting China to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea.
One voice who has raised the alarm about BRI is Samantha Custer, the lead report author at AidData, a research lab at William & Mary University. She told NPR, “We know that China is very opaque about the terms of its assistance. They will include in lending contracts explicit non-disclosure clauses prohibiting the lender from saying how much was borrowed and under what terms.”
Notably, Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to tie his own Eurasia vision to the BRI.
As China continues to tighten its grip over the world’s governments and economies, it is also tightening its grip of influence over America’s ruling class. The New American recently reported that the University of Pennsylvania, which houses the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement (a Biden think tank), took in $51 million in anonymous foreign funding in 2021. That included $14 million from China and Hong Kong; $2.4 million from Saudi Arabia; and $1 million from the Cayman Islands specifically gifted to the Penn Wharton China program.
This comes at the same time that the new GOP Congress is closely looking at the revelation that 10 classified documents were found at the think tank.
Moreover, it has now been made public that Joe Biden was mentioned in an October 2017 email seeking to confirm a multimillion-dollar deal to send natural gas from the United States to China, as seen within correspondence found on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
With the help of the United States’ own commander-in-chief, China is pulling out all the stops in its efforts to destroy America, now even working hand-in-hand with the Mexican cartels to flood the nation’s cities with deadly fentanyl.
Under Biden, human smuggling along the southern border has increased significantly — bringing in $13 billion in July (compared to only $500 million in 2018) — and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reported a 206-percent increase in seized fentanyl along the southern border since 2020.
China is certainly playing an intelligent long-game to sow the seeds of America’s ruin. But its greatest asset is the politicians in Washington, D.C., who are unashamedly enabling it all.
