Ralph K. Ginorio 170-INS NO TO BELT & ROAD IN HAYDEN

There is a plan afoot to develop land for storage units at the Coeur d’Alene Airport/Pappy Boyington Field, in Hayden. On the surface, this seems like a healthy development to our business climate and infrastructure.
However, this proposal has elements which seem fraught with peril. Indications are that the Chinese Communist Party, through their captive Banking system, may be instrumental in financing this venture.
The Chinese Communist Party is funding infrastructure projects globally through their “Belt & Road Initiative”. For the past decade, port facilities, railroads, highways, and airports have been built and improved around the world through a partnership of local leaders and Chinese Officials.
The Chinese government celebrates this as a way of bringing a fractured planet closer together, connected by “one belt and one road”. Projects have been built in, among other places, Cambodia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Djibouti, Kenya, Mongolia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Peru, Panama, and several European and Pacific nations.
These projects all have strategic benefit to China’s new imperial ambitions. Port facilities include provisions for Chinese Naval and Air Bases. Railroads are constructed in sweetheart deals with Chinese contractors at the expense of local labor.
Leases from 50 to 99 years are negotiated, granting China decisive control over the new facilities if the loans are defaulted upon. These loans are predatory in the sense that they benefit corrupt local elites who personally profit from selling out their native interests to benefit China. They are structured to be unpayable.
The President of the Solomon Islands, an area liberated at great cost from Japanese Imperialism during World War II, has recently negotiated deals that grant China special privileges over native residents. He is becoming wealthy by shackling his nation to a new Chinese version of the old 19th Century European Empires.
This use of predatory infrastructure loans to expand China’s reach has been labeled “Debt-Trap Diplomacy”. Already, much of sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and South-East Asia has fallen deeply into irredeemable debt to China. Malaysia and Bolivia are but two nations who have, at great cost, tried to break free of China’s debt-trap.
As with individuals, debt vampirically drains a nation of its future vitality. The profits of a nation’s enterprise go to the debt-holder, rather than to building towards a better future. In the end, unpayable debt reduces independent countries to the status of either colonies or failed states.
The United States is not proof against the predatory investment strategies of today’s Chinese Communist Party. Unlike the Soviets in the Cold War, Chinese Communist agents have fully engaged with our civilian society. Hollywood, corporate America, and even our schools and universities are connected to China through webs of investment and debt.
For example, the Confucius Institute has successfully transmitted Chinese Communist propaganda to countless American educators, teaching them their ideologically sanitized version of history and culture. Big Tech and the entertainment industry are so terrified of being frozen out of the Chinese market that they self-censor anything that Beijing might find objectionable.
This is because today’s Chinese Communist Party is, in economic terms, Communist in name only. They share the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism, improving on their surveillance state with cutting edge technology provided by Silicon Valley.
However, their economic system since the death of Mao in the mid-1970s is based not on Marxism-Leninism but rather on Hitler’s Cartel Capitalism and Mussolini’s Corporative State. China’s social services are nothing like European Welfare States’ “cradle to grave” network of entitlements. Chinese citizens have no welfare “safety net”. This is no egalitarian paradise dedicated to some Marxian fantasy of the brotherhood of man.
Instead, anyone with the right connections can become wealthy; if, and only if, they collaborate with embedded Communist Party officials in thought, word, and deed. Every enterprise and organization in the People’s Republic of China has Communist Party officials involved at every level of decision-making. No decision is made merely for profit or to benefit private interests. The Party Leadership’s interests trump all other priorities.
Post-Mao Chinese leaders have built a system optimized to bring the most power to the leaders of China’s Communist Party; power at all costs, power of all types, power without limits. They have combined economic flexibility with rigid political control.
And, we Americans made it all possible! From the Carter years, American politicians and businessmen have been eager to invest in China in hopes that this would make them more like us. Xi Jinping’s Presidency has proven this hope to be fruitless.
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