I was in Samoa asking my cab driver about the new airport and new school building I saw there. He said the Chinese came in an volunteered to build them. I asked why? He said he didn't know, and that's what worried him.
Unstable countries see those two demands as far simpler than WTO / UN type development, which also tends to come with things like human rights requirements.
And if they can't repay the loan, China will pay THEM to lease it out? Seems like a win-win.
Fast forward a few years, and China has helped prop up their internal construction companies, by giving them state sponsored projects on foreign soil.
And when the countries ultimately fail to repay the loan, China acquires territory over important infrastructure in foreign countries, not unlike how the US has military bases worldwide.
C.f. https://qz.com/1192493/china-spied-on-african-union-headquar...
They are building military infrastructure (listening posts already exist) in Myanmar's Coco Islands, and Maldives too, in their strategy to surround India which is called, "String of Pearls".
For example, if SL resisted and China ignored them then the SL leader would be humiliated and might fall from power and/or China might replace them with someone more agreeable. I think SL's only protection would be if another power, India in particular, decided it was in their interest to push out China. I'm surprised India has allowed China to get a foothold there.
Compare SL to Cuba: Castro survived, AFAICT, because the USSR supported him and used Cuba as a geostrategic base.
Well, China is an authoritarian dictatorship, while the U.S. supports democracy and human rights of the locals. In fact, the U.S. has done more for freedom and democracy in China than the Chinese government: 23 million Chinese people in Taiwan have those things because the U.S. protects them from China's own government. (Yes, the U.S. also does some bad things.)
There is a big difference between a foreign government controlling a military base with the support of the local government, and a foreign government controlling the major ports and railroads due to a debt trap that the local government can't legally escape. Again, the U.S. is imperfect, but the world has seen enough expansionist dictatorships to know what they do.
/s
> violent methods in which it is being spread
That is attempted sometimes (and usually with poor results), but democracy almost always spreads peacefully: India, Brazil, South Korea, most of Europe, South Africa (albeit still a one-party democracy), Mexico, etc. etc.
It's the dictatorships that try to spread their form of government through violence. We can say that if there were no dictatorships - i.e., if all countries were democracies - there probably would be no wars. Even Trump and the GOP aren't threatening war with any democracies.