As far as I'm aware, China has been giving loans to various countries in Africa and building infrastructure in exchange for money and maybe some stuff like recognizing Taiwan as part of China. But why do people say China is imperialist for doing this? Is there truth to it or is it another strain of radlibs eating state department propaganda?
Basically: loans with terms and debt collection are essential parts of neocolonial imperialism, and since China is a member of the IMF and the World Bank and participates in those enterprises they have been culpable in many of the same crimes as capitalist countries when it comes to pushing their national interest abroad to poorer ones. A big part of the protests in Myanmar, for example, is pushback against the Chinese bourgeoisie which own a lot of the capital in that country, and have the same incentive structure as any capitalist institution has when overseas to crush labor organization and capture government oversight.
Now I think it's essential in these conversations to have a sense of scale. China forgives a lot of debt, attaches fewer conditions to its loans, and builds lasting infrastructure which will build a country up (as opposed to most colonial infrastructure which just exists to get the resources out of the country as cheaply as possible). Most importantly China doesn't invade other countries, bomb every building taller than one story and prop up a China-friendly dictator. So I would never equivocate China with America or Europe, even while recognizing that China isn't always good.
Are the bad things that China has done and continues to do required in order for it to build itself up against capitalist encirclement? I don't fucking know, but they are an inevitable outgrowth the of the current SWCC system and the capital that China has exported abroad is something that it will eventually have to reckon with if the CPC is indeed a dictatorship of the proletariat and their society is indeed on the path to a transition to socialism.
tl;dr: read Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
I really enjoyed your post, but I just wanted to expand on one point:
Because this one is huge. The "conditions" attached to these loans are often incredibly invasive and really challenge the notion of how much sovereignty the receiver nations have, all to ensure western capitalists are the ones benefitting. These conditions can be anything like forcing countries to enact brutal austerity, privatize state industries, or make natural resources easily available for extraction to the west at low prices.
I think the brutal austerity is key to understanding this. Chinese investment has never resulted in people losing their healthcare or government subsidies for their homes. It has never turned people into slaves in sweatshops. Western countries through the IMF constantly utilize austerity when restructuring loans and inflict massive punishment on regular people, clearly to extract the most wealth they can from a country. The Chinese would rather forgive an unpaid debt or restructure the terms of a loan without harming people. Whether it is out of the goodwill of the Chinese government or in pursuit of some sort of Machiavellian "soft power" is largely irrelevant to the people whose debts are being forgiven. Thus we see Chinese loans are viewed more favorably by the third world even if they're kind of the same thing as the West's.
in Graeber's Debt book, he talks about the history of debt in relation to the Middle Kingdom and it's relations to other spheres of power and trading entities. Basically, the take home as I recall it, is that there is a long memory of understanding that it's much more optimal to buy up your trade partner's shitty debt (knowing you can't really collect in full), take a haircut on payments, or otherwise forgive loans than it is to destabilize trade relationships because desperate (politically unstable) neighbors are unpredictable. this was the basic sovereign debt policy between the middle kingdom / imperial court and other countries it did business with.
when i read that, i remember realizing that China buying up lots of the US' foreign debt wasn't some power play as it was consistently reported in western media (because why else would someone buy up another's outstanding debt, but to fuck them)... rather it was china doing it's thing and keeping us at the table, because the overall trade relationship was working for them.
like, if China ever just plain decides to be half the dick economically that our media insists they are, we would be dead in the water.
It's also because US debt is a really solid investment, and if your trading partner is getting rich through trade with you it makes sense to buy into their success.
Awesome post. Thanks