I wasn't trying to create any definite story, I'm just saying that it is easy to make a historical analogy depending on what you wantto take away from it. China is not the Soviet Union any more than it is the United States. Doing away with the belt and road initiative by painting it as a Soviet vanity project seems too simple, the country is communist only in name.
For me, this narrative seems to be very typical of our European/American mindset. All great infrastructure plans are grandiose planning, we're done growing, we're 2 years away from the next crisis and so forth and projecting it onto China, which seems to have shaken off that very prediction over and over. China's current mode of development does not comply with our 'End of History' like narrative about how countries ought to develop, so we're stuck in a constant loop of shallow pessimistic analogies.
I would want to see an in-depth analysis of the project really looking at the consequences with an eye on the long-term effects rather than just stories about some harbor in Africa falling short of expectations. This is not illuminating.
Finding a neutral in-depth analysis of the project is not easy. In a Google search, I find Japanese, Indian and European opinions . Yet best is the Wikipedia article IMHO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
You won't find a neutral in-depth analysis of the project in Bloomberg (or FT, Economist,etc) as a substantial amount of stories about China are "wishful thinking" meant to be "self fulfilling prophecies" by influencing investors [1]. I mean mostly against China.
What was Bloomberg's (FT, Economist, the general economists' consensus, whichever) position in the year before the 2008 crisis? How many times did they flag the impending burst?
Every media outlet has an undisclosed interest somewhere or at the very least a heavy bias sometimes. And it's highlighted more than ever when those trusted pillars of reporting like Bloomberg, FT, or the Economist come up with conflicting information.
Right now CCTV in China or RT in Russia are saying the same thing about the US, or the EU, or Japan, or Korea. And the people reading and listening are having the same discussion we're having just with different conclusions based on that trusted information.
It is possible to call bubbles, especially if they are as large and data is transparently available. It is really hard to tell the moment when it will pop, especially if it is connected with the government like in the soviet union or in China.
I'm not arguing the possibility of seeing them but whether you visibly flag them or not. A bad prediction might turn into a self fulfilling prophecy. At the very least it could make a dent in the people's trust. You do this on an election year and you'll pay for it. You might get the shaft regardless if your prediction makes someone powerful look bad.
So when you're playing close to home positive stuff gets the fanfare, negative predictions are underplayed. You're talking about your own market after all. Why do you think it's so easy for these publications to hit at anything that's not domestic? The further away, the less friendly the player, the more scathing the prediction.
The Economist was generally quite consistent about it, including in its American publishing (which is mostly written by American authors). I was reading The Economist at the time, and so the housing bust did not really surprise me; and I don't remember any false positives at the time. (They called it a little too early, though, as a lot of the "smart" money did.)
> an in-depth analysis of the project really looking at the consequences with an eye on the long-term effects
You won't find them because these aren't projects being developed (a) with private capital nor (b) for their economic merits. When a bridge is built in America, someone issues a bond. That issuance--both leading up to it and once in the wild--produces an incentive to do good analysis.
That incentive isn't there with Belt and Road. State-owned banks provide the capital. And the reasoning for the development is strategic, so you get geopolitical and military talking heads instead of good economists, whose services are ironically better allocated to analyzing other projects.
Sorry did you respond to the wrong person? The harbour story that recently made headlines concerned the port in Djibouti, which to my knowledge is located in East Africa. I did not mention Sri Lanka.
For me, this narrative seems to be very typical of our European/American mindset. All great infrastructure plans are grandiose planning, we're done growing, we're 2 years away from the next crisis and so forth and projecting it onto China, which seems to have shaken off that very prediction over and over. China's current mode of development does not comply with our 'End of History' like narrative about how countries ought to develop, so we're stuck in a constant loop of shallow pessimistic analogies.
I would want to see an in-depth analysis of the project really looking at the consequences with an eye on the long-term effects rather than just stories about some harbor in Africa falling short of expectations. This is not illuminating.