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.