As I have been writing since 2011, China’s development lending was always likely to follow the pattern of other countries when they first “went out” (e.g. the US in the 1920s, USSR in the 1950s, Japan in the late 1970s). Because of little historical...
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Good article. But while growing international criticism and rising trade tensions may have had some impact, as the article suggests, I don’t think they really explain the great reversal in BRI lending of the past few years.
As I have been writing since 2011, China’s development lending was always likely to follow the pattern of other countries when they first “went out” (e.g. the US in the 1920s, USSR in the 1950s, Japan in the late 1970s). Because of little historical...
knowledge and no previous experience, an early rapid rise in development lending would be driven mainly by underestimating risk and an overestimation of their own business "success" in making loans, and would of course be further supported by geopolitical ambitions.
This combination would inevitably lead to bad lending decisions, followed just as inevitably by debt restructuring, loan losses, and a contraction in development lending. In the 1920s, for example, the US set off quite explicitly and aggressively to displace England in...
Latin America, and American businesses and banks assumed they “understood” Latin America much better than the English did, in spite of the vast English experience there, but their early displacement of British lending only resulted in the huge loan losses of the 1930s.
The impression I get from Chinese friends involved in the lending process is that the real shock for Beijing occurred in 2014-15, when cratering oil prices left Venezuela in tatters, and China was forced reluctantly to provide first $4 billion in 2014 and then another $5...
billion in 2015 in cash-for-oil deals.
These and all its previous Venezuelan loans were then restructured for 3 years (and restructured again 3 years later). A friend of mine working on the deal told me at the time that all Latin American lending was now coming under...
much tighter scrutiny, and that there would be no new lending to Venezuela.
It is not surprising to me at all that this is when BRI lending peaked and began subsequently to fall. I don’t think Venezuela was the first loan...
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Priyamvada Gopal is part of a class of elite academics in the imperial core who teach the ruling class, and use woke radlib rhetoric to justify current Western imperial aggression.
She echoes propaganda against Syria, Iran, and China and is silent about Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc
Anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University Professor @PriyamvadaGopal smears opponents of the Western neocolonial war on Syria as "Assadists"
Would she ever call liberal imperialist Obama a "blood-soaked cretin"? He has exponentially more blood on
The CIA spent over a billion dollars per year arming and training "rebels" who massacred and ethnically cleansed Syrian civilians, especially religious minorities.
But anti-anti-imperialist @PriyamvadaGopal insists these CIA-backed contras are
This was elite anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University gatekeeper @PriyamvadaGopal's response right after colonial powers the US, UK, and France bombed Syria in April 2018 on bogus lies that have since been
Of course anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge Professor @PriyamvadaGopal's is also a supporter of the neoliberal imperialist European Union -- one of the key institutions of European necolonialism
She echoes propaganda against Syria, Iran, and China and is silent about Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc
Far too much of the 'left' is into a joke version of "anti-imperialism" which denies state atrocities in the global south.
— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) January 14, 2021
Anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University Professor @PriyamvadaGopal smears opponents of the Western neocolonial war on Syria as "Assadists"
Would she ever call liberal imperialist Obama a "blood-soaked cretin"? He has exponentially more blood on
Let us be in no doubt: there is nothing anti-imperialist about supporting a blood-soaked cretin like Assad. https://t.co/nuzJE6xUy5?
— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) February 21, 2018
The CIA spent over a billion dollars per year arming and training "rebels" who massacred and ethnically cleansed Syrian civilians, especially religious minorities.
But anti-anti-imperialist @PriyamvadaGopal insists these CIA-backed contras are
Deeming non-ISIS Syrian resistance CIA stooges: embarrassing, insulting and patronising
— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) November 29, 2015
This was elite anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University gatekeeper @PriyamvadaGopal's response right after colonial powers the US, UK, and France bombed Syria in April 2018 on bogus lies that have since been
Am truly glad that a lot of people are 'holding Syria in their thoughts' since last night. Was there a reason they weren't being 'held in your thoughts' since 2011 when Assad crushed a popular uprising and kept bombing his own people with Russian assistance?
— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) April 14, 2018
Of course anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge Professor @PriyamvadaGopal's is also a supporter of the neoliberal imperialist European Union -- one of the key institutions of European necolonialism
Worth your realising that over this, over Syria, over Brexit, you are swiftly losing enthusiastic support we once offered you
— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) November 9, 2016