You can only beat China with a lot of money. The dictatorship in Beijing has been buying into many countries since 2013 with its “New Silk Road” initiative, making them politically pliable and dependent on itself. This should be over now.

At the G7 summit in Elmau, southern Germany, US President Biden announced an investment program of 600 billion dollars to finance infrastructure projects designed according to the values ​​and ideas of the free world. The advance comes at the right time. In the meantime, it has dawned on some in the Chinese Communist Party that Xi Jinping’s flagship project is by no means an investment based on economic criteria.

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A number of countries cannot pay their loans and, like Sri Lanka, have to cede a port to China, which the People’s Republic can now use for 99 years, including militarily. The bad experiences are piling up, which is why countries now want to downsize projects that were originally agreed with China.

The African Zambia could no longer service its loans and has to restructure. China will lose money in the process. Not everyone in Beijing likes that. Because those who can still calculate but are not allowed to speak out because otherwise they would face repression and imprisonment as punishment know that China has overdone itself under Xi.

The New Silk Road serves the ruler to provoke his political opponents, above all the USA. For example, there is no other explanation for the $67 billion that Beijing lent to Caracas. The country has repaid part of its debt in oil, which certainly cheered Beijing up, but more important was the investment-related military partnership China has forged with Venezuela right on America’s doorstep.

Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian teaches democratic theory in Germany, Austria and Spain as an honorary professor at Leuphana University. In the 2017-18 academic year, he was at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong to conduct research on China’s rise. He is currently researching new technologies at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and how they are used in democracies and abused in dictatorships.

Unlike the Chinese infrastructure projects, which are not awarded transparently, the G7 program should follow clear criteria that, among other things, prevent countries from falling into a debt trap. By 2027, 300 billion will flow from Europe, 200 billion from the USA, 65 billion from Japan and 5.4 billion from Canada. According to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, this should promote democratic countries from the Indo-Pacific to West Africa. US President Biden also made it clear that these loans, unlike those granted by China, should ultimately also pay off economically.

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Since the money comes from public and private sources, there is an additional guarantee that the money is not used politically, but economically. In addition, development banks should be included in the investment plans and the sums invested should even increase over time. Projects in Senegal and Angola could be funded first, a factory producing vaccines and a solar energy plant.

However, the 600 billion G7 investments are already offset by 850 billion in investments from the People’s Republic that were pumped into the New Silk Road between 2013 and 2021. So there is still a need to catch up. In response to the G7’s announcement, Beijing was tight-lipped: it welcomes any investment in global infrastructure, the Foreign Ministry said.

After the G7 meeting, the heads of state and government travel on to the NATO summit in Madrid. There they also talk about Africa, but this time from a military point of view: China and Russia are increasingly active on the continent, Russia is building a base in Sudan, China already has one in Djibouti.

In the end, both meetings could lead to an overall strategy as to how future liberal, constitutional and democratic nations can meet the challenge posed by the dictatorships in Moscow and Beijing and ultimately defeat them.

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