China’s Belt & Road Initiative to Establish Africa's Infrastructure Networks

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China’s Belt & Road Initiative: An Epitome of Neocolonialism
The growing Chinese influence in poorer African, Asian, and European nations through the country’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) is an archetype of modern financial neocolonialism. In 2013, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, unveiled an ambitious investment project in foreign countries. His tactic was to debt fund low-income nations to the development of expensive infrastructure projects. However, contrary to the Western oil companies that have always loaned these countries without exerting influence over their ways of life, Chinese labor is a prerequisite for establishing these projects, particularly the top-level management. The cooperation has also resulted in the flooding of cheap imports from China into the African market. Recent years have witnessed China becoming one of the largest trade partners. Several African countries export natural resources exceeding $200 billion per annum while China is increasingly pumping cheap goods into Africa. The BRI project will see China control more than 4.4 people in the world with a cumulative GDP of $21 trillion (Taylor 30). The sinister approach of promising a zero percent interest rate on the loaned amount could likely bear some hidden cost. The Chinese are executing a strategy with a hidden card of debt-trap diplomacy. Some of the Chinese-funded projects and loans to Africa and Asia include Kenya’s Mombasa to Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, Egypt’s New Administrative Capital, Uganda’s Entebbe to Kampala Expressway, Sri-Lanka’s deep-water port, Angola’s $20 billion debt, and the already defaulted Zambia’s loan. The likely motivation of these plans could be China now sees itself as the new global power with the right to harness deep economic ties with the poor African and Asian nations. The poor countries are snared into accepting the loan with their nationalized resources as collateral. These agreements have complicated the matters on countries accessing the loans because they are not required to pay back in cash but through their national resources such as oil exports and minerals. Focusing on the Kenyan Mombasa-Nairobi Superhighway project, this paper demonstrates how the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative epitomizes the neocolonialism agenda as China makes leaps to become a colonial power in poor countries in Africa, South Asia, and Europe.
The Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious Chinese project that aims to establish a network of infrastructure in Africa and connect the economies of the participating nations to China. However, there have been serious debates about the cost of the projects to the host countries, sustainability and legacy issues, the social and environmental price the connected countries will have to pay back, and the long-term value and future of such cooperation (Taylor 29). Focusing on the BRI, Githaiga and Bing (219) have examined the impacts of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya from the port of Mombasa to Nairobi. While both China and Kenya have praised the SGR as one of the most excellent projects of the Sino-African cooperation with signs of “win-win” situations, findings show that the SGR has raised countless issues, including debt sustainability, employment, and neocolonialism (Taylor 29). The SGR that cost the Kenyan government $3.2 billion aimed to cut transit time between Nairobi and Mombasa. However, reports show that the East African country has lost money since the project’s inception in 2017 through leaders’ corruption. Regardless of the losses, the country has to repay the loan or have the infrastructure repossessed by China. Through neocolonialism, China aims to control the direction of the resources in poor African countries, as governments in those countries lose control over their nationalized natural resources. This is a form of colonial practice as the governments in participating countries will cease exercising independence in their land. Therefore, if Kenya is strapped in a debt trap and cannot pay for the loan extended to the government, China will have to control the government’s decisions over its own resources. A case example is Angola that benefited from a $20 billion loan from Chinese firms. Today, almost the entire loan is serviced through the exportation of oil. As China continues with the BRI project, it has increasingly seen itself as the rising global superpower following the deep economic cooperation with the African nations.
As a rebuttal to the claims that China is extending the neocolonialism approach through the BRI project and the SGR, the China Daily, the official new media in China that broadcasts in English, has defended the country’s move as an effort to make African c...