The saddest story yet (in my opinion) is the contemplation over how
Chinese investments and the BRI in particular can serve as
opportunities, how becoming ‘infrastructure corridors’ can be great for
Eurasian peripheries, and how Europe should remain open to these
opportunities but also be careful about it, as if we have learned
nothing from the centuries of the Western imperialism, how the
geographic expansion of capitalism never goes painless and who the
BRI-like debt-financed mega spatial fixes benefit. If one looks at it
from the EU perspective, fear combined with the willingness to tap into
the opportunities of this project is not so surprising – in the end it
is a promised gigantic accumulation machine that the EU will not want to
entirely miss out on. If we look at it with even a mild empathy for
societies impacted and possibly tossed around this project, if we ask
who will be reaping benefits and who will be carrying the burden of the
debt repayment and environmental destruction, then perhaps we take a
little more care with the ‘opportunities’ side. This brings us of course
to the most obvious and painful absence in the existing literature on
China and Eastern Europe, namely, the absence of working and
dispossessed populations. In this nation-state focused debate, while the
local political and financial elites are eagerly signing up for
infrastructure loans, we are rarely reminded that ‘the debt is not a
legitimate burden acquired by the bulk of the people in any country,’
that the borrowing is usually ‘done by capital, for capital and against
workers’ (Cleaver, 2016, p. 39), and that ‘usually the people who end
up paying the debt are the least privileged and most marginalized
population’ (Harvey and Nak-chung, 2017, p. 253).
https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/questioning-dominant-accounts-of-chinese-investments-in-eastern-europe-and-eurasia/
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