I first read about Belt and Road in the South China Morning Post. It's quite a project but even in the Post there was a lot of grumbling about cost effectiveness and overruns.

I find the whole thing fascinating, especially the comparison to the US Space program::

Belt and Road

Any one at WTF studying Cantonese.?
Recall that Altoid was.

Infrastructure. China haz it.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
Any one at WTF studying Cantonese.?
Recall that Altoid was.

Mandarin. Cantonese wasnt available or it would have been that - 8(?) tones instead of 4. Talk about rewiring a brain!

Thanks, Steve, I have been meaning to read up on China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Just scratching the surface ...
It reads like a heck of a foreign+economic policy.

Already a Chinese government backed infrastructure investment bank capitalized at 100 Billion USD to fund infrastructure development under this Initiative, comparable to USA's inflation-adjusted contribution under the Marshall Plan.

The Chinese Wikimedia has this map showing its ambitious grophical reach: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...ne-belt-one-road.svg

And across that vast geographical reach, it advocates policy collaboration, infrastructure interconnectivity, trade, capital flow, and "connecting the people's hearts and minds."

What's our policy?
We pulled out of the TPP, slightly revised NAFTA and renamed it USMCA, threatening to pull out of NATO, and asking our 3rd largest trading partner to pay for a wall that they don't want built.

I thought the same thing and have no answer.

OTOH our billionaires pay almost nothing in taxes so there is that.

Italy signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47679760