YCW Brussels Belt and Road series: China’s BRI and the ‘Debt Trap’ question
Categories: Event
Date: 13/06/2019
Time: 19 h 00 - 21 h 00
Location: L’horlage du sud
Links: iCal - Google Calendar
YCW Brussels Belt and Road series: “China’s BRI and the ‘Debt Trap’ question – part 2” (June 13) with Barry Sautman, Visiting Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
When? Thursday, June 13, 2019, 19:00
Where? L’horloge du Sud, rue du Trône 141
Join YCW Brussels for the second part of our Belt and Road series on June 13th.
After Agatha Kratz set the broader context of Chinese Foreign Investments strategy in part one of this series, Professor Barry Sautman will now guide us in part two through the US counter-mobilization and the “Chinese debt trap” rhetoric.
The political and economic mobilization that is China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has given rise, since 2017, to a US-led counter-mobilization.
While the BRI is portrayed as consisting mainly of infrastructure building and investment in developing countries, the counter-mobilization focuses principally on the “Chinese debt trap”. According to this rhetoric, China putatively indebts countries knowing they will be unable to repay their loans and then seizes the defaulting country’s valuable assets. Tales of the debt trap have common characteristics: they are above all promoted by US politicians and media, they have no empirical basis, and they are replete with themes that invoke classical Yellow Peril images about China and Chinese. One example of a supposed actually-existing “Chinese debt trap” is constantly referenced: Sri Lanka and its Hambantota Port.
About Barry Sautman
Barry Sautman is a political scientist and lawyer at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. His research and publications over the past quarter-century have mainly focused on ethnic politics in China, China-Africa links, and the Belt and Road Initiative. His broadly comparative research has been grounded in fieldwork in African countries where Chinese investment is prominent and in ethnic minority areas of China, and he has published several monographs and scores of articles in a variety of area studies and disciplinary journals.
