Manufacturing Consent

You have quite the white savior complex, framing these countries as incapable of managing their own development and waiting for Western guidance. Your moral panic says far more about your own assumptions than it does about the reality of Chinese engagement in the Global South. Chinese development loans under the Belt and Road Initiative are fundamentally different from imperialism. They are project-based, negotiated directly with sovereign governments, and aimed at infrastructure, energy, and industrial development. Loans are disbursed in stages, interest rates are often below market levels, and when repayment difficulties arise, debts are routinely restructured, extended, or forgiven. The recipient nations retain full agency over the projects and the terms, and no superprofits are extracted to enrich a foreign elite. This is a system of win-win development, not coercive exploitation. Equating these loans with the immense suffering inflicted by Western imperialism on the periphery is morally and historically indefensible. Centuries of slavery, colonial plunder, and exploitative trade and debt regimes produced catastrophic human suffering and immense superprofits for imperial powers. To lump China’s mutually agreed, development-oriented loans in with that is tantamount to Holocaust denial or double genocide theory. It erases real violence and recasts historically victimized nations as somehow naive or weak while ignoring the agency and sovereignty they exercise today. Your argument is not grounded in evidence. It is a recycled narrative from Western media and NGOs whose interest lies in discrediting non-Western development models and keeping formerly colonized nations dependent. Portraying China as “imperialist” in Africa is a story designed for Western moral comfort, not an assessment of real-world economic and political structures.

Source: your asshole

Debt trapping is when I invest billions into infrastructure projects for a country, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, and then the worst part of it all? I have a record of forgiving loans taken by the countries as well because I'm so evil

China is not debt trapping poor African nations. We can see that this isn't the case when we can observe countries in BRI engaging in rapid development and industrializing, and this is confirmed by China forgiving tons of debt. The goal of China isn't to make countries reliant on them, or to earn money from debt, it's because China gains personally through mutual development. Here are some articles debunking the "debt trap" myth:

• Five Imperialist Myths About China's Role in Africa

• China debt trap? PH an 'expert in bad loans,' Locsin says

• Deborah Brautigam Debunks the Chinese Debt Trap Theory in New Research Paper

• China's Debt Relief for Africa: Emerging Deliberations

There are many more examples I can use. China isn't doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, but because they stand to gain from mutual development. A more developed global south means China is less reliant on the US Empire as a customer, provides new avenues to facilitate trade, and creates more markets for customers. The west harvests the global south for cheap labor and resources, and we can see hard comparisons in data between BRI participants and those imperialized by the west to see fundamentally different results.

It's clear at this point: participation in BRI results in sustained and rapid development and mutual cooperation, and working with the west results in sustained impoverishment. Again, it appears that you believe any cooperation between more developed and less developed countries is inherently imperialist, and impossible to be mutually beneficial. I'd like to see proof.