By Robyn Dixon
From the article:
China has promoted its massive global infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative, with dancing children singing a propaganda pop song, an animated rap and TV bedtime storieswith tinkly background music on how “it helps everyone.”
“We’ll share the goodness now, the Belt and Road is how,” the children sing in a 2017 video about President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy cornerstone.
But lately the government’s big spending in Africa and elsewhere faces a growing domestic backlash, from leading academics to everyday Chinese on social media websites.
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Crushing BRI debt might haunt some other countries too. A report in March by the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, warned that 23 of 68 countries were at “quite high” risk of debt distress due to Belt and Road projects, while eight others could have trouble servicing their debt — Pakistan, Djibouti, the Maldives, Laos, Mongolia, Montenegro, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
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