cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31849971
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s flagship global infrastructure program was supposed to help expand Beijing’s global influence.
It did.
But rushed construction and poor planning have led to massive environmental destruction in mostly poor countries.
Some projects have degraded highly sensitive ecosystems and displaced scores of local communities.
Beijing says it’s now “greening” its Belt and Road Initiative. But is it?
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China is deploying low-carbon investments through its $1.3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative. But many of these projects come with risks of their own. Case in point: Two hydroelectric dams in Argentina could flood cultural heritage sites and harm one of the world’s largest glacial icefields.
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In a series of agreements between 2009 and 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping extended Argentina billions of dollars in infrastructure loans and currency swaps—allowing Buenos Aires to exchange Chinese yuan for pesos to meet debt repayment deadlines.
These deals deepened Argentina’s dependence on China, which was aggressively expanding its economic footprint in Latin America. The agreements covered a staggering range of projects: nuclear energy, telecommunications, South America’s largest radio telescope and a Chinese-run space station, over which Beijing secured control for 50 years.
The spending spree, analysts say, was fueled by China’s excess capacity at home, the need to create new markets abroad and geopolitical ambitions. As Chinese policy banks showered nations with generous loans, some recipient governments aligned their votes at the United Nations with Beijing, including a measure to block debate on China’s alleged human rights abuses at home.
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A coalition of nonprofits filed a lawsuit in 2015, questioning the Santa Cruz dams’ environmental impact assessment. A second lawsuit, filed by lawyer Enrique Viale, alleged that the government official who approved the assessment is the same person who earlier served as director of the contractor that prepared it.
That environmental impact statement, which is supposed to analyze all of the ecological risks of the dams, is “full of deficiencies,” said Cristian Fernandez, a lawyer with the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation, one of the nonprofits behind the 2015 lawsuit.
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In March 2016, China Development Bank sent Macri [center-right businessman Mauricio Marci replaced Fernandez de Krichner as president in 2015] a letter, urging him to restart operations. The bank drew Macri’s attention to a “cross default” clause in the loan agreement. Should Argentina cancel the Santa Cruz dams project, China had the right to cancel funding for railway revitalization in Argentina’s northern agricultural region. Losing that funding would undercut the ability to sell more soybeans, corn and beef—Argentina’s top exports and a source of badly needed foreign currency.
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Since 2023, China has invested more than $100 billion in renewable energy projects overseas, even as overall spending under the Belt and Road Initiative has declined in recent years.
Human rights experts and conservationists worry this green iteration of the Belt and Road could mirror the environmental and social damage of earlier projects.
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Kenneth Roth, who led the global watchdog group Human Rights Watch for nearly three decades, said Beijing’s motivations haven’t changed.
“China’s trying to buy loyalty,” he said.
Lacking a democratic mandate at home, the Chinese Communist Party places high value on international legitimacy and is wary of formal condemnations from bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council, Roth said. In 2019, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Imran Khan told Roth that his government’s reluctance to speak out about China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims, which included forced labor, forced sterilizations and re-education camps, was due to fear of economic repercussions. Pakistan, a majority Muslim country, is estimated to be Beijing’s biggest Belt and Road partner. Pakistan was one of several Belt and Road countries that blocked a U.N. rights council debate on the Uyghur issue in 2022.
“China has been trying to use the U.N. to basically dumb down and largely rip up international human rights standards,” Roth said. “It has globalized its censorship very successfully.”
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China’s guardrails around environmentally risky projects are beginning to catch up to lenders like the World Bank, said Rebecca Ray, an economist at Boston University who has written extensively about China’s activity in Latin America.
The difficulty, Ray said, is that many developing countries where China invests have weak environmental ministries and little political will to enforce social protections. China, unlike most development banks and Western governments, doesn’t condition its loans on governance reforms. “China doesn’t care about institution building,” Ray said. “They care about development.”
By 2021, China had environmental and social safeguards in contracts for 57 percent of its infrastructure projects, but only 18 percent showed clear evidence of efforts to reduce environmental and social risks, according to AidData, a university research lab at William & Mary in Virginia.
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[Javier] Milei, a Trump ally and climate-change denier, promised as a candidate to slash Argentina’s bureaucracy and stop all public works projects [work on the Santa Cruz River dams has been on hold since 2023]. To make his point, he waved a chainsaw in the air at rallies and declared in Spanish on social media: “THERE IS NO NEW MONEY!” He also made waves during his campaign by calling Chinese officials “assassins” and promising to avoid deals with “communists.”
In office, however, his stance changed. Among other things, he’s renewed Argentina’s $18 billion currency swap line with China, using some of the funds to meet IMF debt payments. The change in tone, analysts say, is because of the leverage China holds over Buenos Aires.
When Milei took office in 2023, Argentina again faced an economic crisis. That year, Argentina’s inflation broke 200 percent, its lucrative agricultural exports were imperiled by severe drought and Buenos Aires again struggled to meet its debt obligations. **After the International Monetary Fund and private bond holders, China is Buenos Aires’ largest creditor, holding about 13 percent of the nation’s debt. ** “If China calls Argentina’s loans, it will heavily destabilize Argentina’s economy,” said Albe, of the Atlantic Council.
And so, in late February, the same month Milei presented Elon Musk with a chainsaw on stage at a U.S. conservative conference, his administration sent Chinese officials a confidential message.
Argentina, it said, wanted to restart work on one of the dams.