ROME, July 23 (Reuters) - Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who will visit the White House on Thursday, said that U.S. President Joe Biden had never challenged her on the issue of Rome being part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Meloni leads the only major Western country to have joined China’s BRI scheme, which envisions rebuilding the old Silk Road to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond with large infrastructure spending.
I wonder why then, if it’s a debt trap, China has such a better record of forgiving foreign loans than other countries and institutions? The IMF requires economic control for their loans, including such stipulations as the privatization of public infrastructure, dismantling of labor laws, and lowering of minimum wages in their loans on a regular basis. I’ve not heard of any such requirements from Chinese loans, and in fact billions of dollars of loans were forgiven during the Covid-19 crisis. Why is there no criticism of the IMF loan regime and its fundamentally exploitative loans? The whole criticism reeks of orientalist hysteria to me.
Forgiving loans is soft power. That’s the simple answer.
Well that answers literally not a single one of the questions I asked, but thanks! So is it a debt trap? Or is it a soft power play? If they’re forgiving the debts in exchange for soft power, while allowing the nation to maintain sovereignty over the infrastructure, then how is it a debt trap? If it’s a debt trap, then why are they forgiving the loans?