China's Westward One Belt One Road Strategy

Hendrik_2000 said:

If you read the western press, the narrative was nobody like China in Africa because they are slave driver and they disregard environment , labor law and their product are so lousy it broke down the next day.But but the reality is completely different

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To be fair, there were some well-documented quality problems with some of China's earlier infrastructure projects, and "cheap" consumer goods are just that; like Jimmy Dean said, "you get what you paid for." There are lots of decent to high quality goods China exports to Africa and everywhere else in the world, but those that buy the cheapest items complain no less about quality fails than those that buy high quality goods. It's just human nature.

Reality is most Chinese consumer, commercial, and infrastructure goods compete successfully on all levels of quality, and increasingly breaching the "panache" mirage of Western and Japanese goods. The vested interests don't like the competition, so they throw out everything they could to forestall the inevitable, be they true or not.

Hendrik_2000 said:

However, an increased Chinese influence over Africa may cause trouble in the future, and perhaps stifle the development of democracy, Lekorwe says.

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And the lack of democratic development until now had nothing to do with the pernicious influence of the former colonial ruler? Think UK, France.

delft said:

And the lack of democratic development until now had nothing to do with the pernicious influence of the former colonial ruler? Think UK, France.

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Often the western colonial powers only grant democracy to the locals when they leave the colonies.

taxiya said:

Often the western colonial powers only grant democracy to the locals when they leave the colonies.

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It is not up to the colonial powers to "grant"democracy. Indeed it was recently mentioned in the British news that when UK let Kenya become "independent" it rigged the politics to have a Britain friendly government and exclude as many of the Mau Mau resistance as possible. The occasion was a court case in London brought by men who were castrated while being prisoner seventy years ago. Democracy has even now not really taken off in Kenya. I hope that the economic improvements due to the building of the new railways by China will have a positive effect.

delft said:

It is not up to the colonial powers to "grant"democracy. Indeed it was recently mentioned in the British news that when UK let Kenya become "independent" it rigged the politics to have a Britain friendly government and exclude as many of the Mau Mau resistance as possible. The occasion was a court case in London brought by men who were castrated while being prisoner seventy years ago. Democracy has even now not really taken off in Kenya. I hope that the economic improvements due to the building of the new railways by China will have a positive effect.

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I was being sarcastic about the former colonial powers' sincerity about democracy in the post-colonial era.

taxiya said:

Often the western colonial powers only grant democracy to the locals when they leave the colonies.

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Turn that around for eastern communist dictators..."Often eastern dictators leave only dictators behind when they leave their colonies". A good example is what the Vietnamese left behind in Cambodia in 1989.

suby68 said:

Turn that around for eastern communist dictators..."Often eastern dictators leave only dictators behind when they leave their colonies". A good example is what the Vietnamese left behind in Cambodia in 1989.

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ok, here is what may looks in your eyes.
Western colonial (real by its deed) dictatorship and discrimination handover to crony "democracy" at their departure.
Eastern "colonial" (invented by your imagination) "dictatorship" handover to "dictatorship".

At least the eastern "dictators" were sincere in their act. While the western "democracies" are hypocrites. Aren't they? If the western "democracy" established democracy by the local populace from the day one when they landed in these places, I wouldn't have made my post.

BTW, although I am totally against Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia as a Chinese, calling that occupation equivalent to western colonialism is way far a stretch of the word and a emotional speech than fact. If you make that equation, all military conquest in the whole human history would be colonialism essentially you make the term meaningless.

I also think one belt strategy is also a long term effort to counter the spread of ultra conservative Salafist movement which was been actively spread around all over the world by Saudi oil money.

If you look at the profiles at those people, they are mostly grow up isolated, poor and thus easily influenced by extremist ideology.

However once they have gained some wealth and have some stake in material things, they are less likely to go for the salafist teachings.

From history and geography of Xinjiang, you can see this area has always been relatively undeveloped.

If China don't open up Xinjiang, there is only so much China can do by throwing money into the area, and if they do that, most of the money will be capture by the people who have connections, that is the elite uygur or Han people, and vast majority of people still poor. However if you open up trade, it will be more likely to benefit everyone in the area, and thus people will have more stake in the government, and with more wealth, less likely to revolt and less likely to accept extremist ideology.

sanblvd said:

I also think one belt strategy is also a long term effort to counter the spread of ultra conservative Salafist movement which was been actively spread around all over the world by Saudi oil money.

If you look at the profiles at those people, they are mostly grow up isolated, poor and thus easily influenced by extremist ideology.

However once they have gained some wealth and have some stake in material things, they are less likely to go for the salafist teachings.

From history and geography of Xinjiang, you can see this area has always been relatively undeveloped.

If China don't open up Xinjiang, there is only so much China can do by throwing money into the area, and if they do that, most of the money will be capture by the people who have connections, that is the elite uygur or Han people, and vast majority of people still poor. However if you open up trade, it will be more likely to benefit everyone in the area, and thus people will have more stake in the government, and with more wealth, less likely to revolt and less likely to accept extremist ideology.

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Yeah assuming the people from Xinjiang don't travel to other parts of China for better opportunities either as a migrant worker or move to 2nd and 3rd tier cities for work and family life, than you have a point. The revolt came mostly from being brain washed by extremist and separatists terrorists groups supported either by foreign NGOs or outsiders.

Equation said:

Yeah assuming the people from Xinjiang don't travel to other parts of China for better opportunities either as a migrant worker or move to 2nd and 3rd tier cities for work and family life, than you have a point. The revolt came mostly from being brain washed by extremist and separatists terrorists groups supported either by foreign NGOs or outsiders.

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There is not a lot of uygur people moving into mainland cities from what I can see, and uygur themselves have very high birth rate in Xinjiang itself mostly in isolated communities.

Also if you look at uygur's income vs Han in Xinjiang there is a big gap, so unless things get better, uygur community will be an easy target for extremist ideology.

Also I don't think Western NGO are the ones spreading the salafist teachings into Xinjiang, it is more like the Sunni revival in general in the past 20 years coming from the chaos of middle east + Saudi oil money funding wahhabists teaching to all over the world.

People always think Xinjang is losing control, but I would argue that China is having the best policy to put a lid on this wave of extremist ideology for the past 20 years or so. If you look at Turkey, Egypt, the European Balkans, Africa or Europe in general, its far worse.

And I do classify this as a wave, just like in the past waves of post ww2 communism movement, or even earlier, the pre ww1 Anarchist movements. And if you look at the salafist movement closely, they offer less formula for success than communism, so in the long term it will fail. The question is, before it fails, how many nations/civilizations it will burns to the ground.

I think US and China can survive this, but Europe and Africa will be changed, there are some ways I think they can be fought, but I'm getting off topic.