China s Belt & Road: Britain s Empire Meets Brooklyn s Mob

The Belt & Road initiative will serve still another Chinese need. The country s leadership in Beijing is no doubt aware of China s impending demographic problems. As this post explains in some detail, Beijing s decades-long one-child policy has so reduced the flow of young people into the country s labor force that China in coming years will face a shortage of workers to serve its economy and support an outsized elderly population. Since Beijing can have little expectation of an inflow of youthful immigrants, the ownership and control of foreign facilities can serve as a substitute for China s lost labor. Presently, China mostly uses its own labor to construct and run projects in the Belt & Road, but in time it could, much the way the British Empire did, use native labor, reserving management for its own citizens. And perhaps, as also happened with the British Empire, the arrangement would garner for China a loyalty among a group of natives that supersedes that group s loyalty to the local or national authority.

Whether China succeeds in this effort is and open question and will remain so for some time to come. Amid the fear and anxiety Americans surely feel in anticipating any level of Belt & Road success, the effort by the Chinese Communist Party does bring up a delightful irony. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Russia s communist movement and then the Soviet Union, identified all European imperialism as a futile effort to sustain an economic system capitalism that he believed was ultimately unsustainable. Now the world can witness an effort by the Chinese Communist Party to use its version of imperialism in an effort to sustain communist economic arrangements that look fundamentally unsustainable.

via www.forbes.com