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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>It's still an ally, more than the Chinese will ever be.

The US has no concept for Africa, because unlike China which uses infrastructure projects and investment as a way to offload its export surplus the US is an overwhelmingly domestic economy.

There will never be an American 'Belt and Road' because it just doesn't make much sense for a country that has so little international economic exposure, whenever the US forms alliances it is towards purely political ends. In that sense one could indeed characterise the relationship with China as more stable. No Chinese leader is suddenly going to go isolationist over the next two decades just because they feel like it.

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> There will never be an American 'Belt and Road' because it just doesn't make much sense for a country that has so little international economic exposure

It's not because of a domestic economy. It's because a freight/boat is much more economical than a train and a train doesn't make any sense.

It's only here ( now ), because it's heavy subsidized by China and an excuse for modern colonialism.

PS. A lot of ( sane / healthy) infrastructure works are happening in Africa with Europe / US though. But if it's not feasible, it ain't going to happen. That's where the Chinese come in to burry them in debt.

Even this framing is suspect -- China has very publicly been trying to shift from an export-driven economy to a domestic consumption economy recently.

I question how stable the relationship is when that stability rests on the assumption China fails to meet its economic goals.

China is still a country with significant room for industrial expansion with hundreds of millions of people moving from rural to urban areas adding to the manufacturing workforce, the country as a whole has not reached levels of prosperity that would produce a consumer driven economy, and one also needs to account for the heavy influence of export-led sectors on policy-making and the state-led economy which doesn't tend to lend itself well to consumer sectors.

And also quite importantly as China climbs up the value chain it will increasingly seek to outsource to cheaper countries, as it has already started doing in Pakistan, one of the major hubs of the Belt and Road initiative. And given the quite authoritarian system, it will probably do so quite effectively without facing the political backlash that workers in the United States have caused.

Trying to, means they are currently not.

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