Chas Freeman, US diplomat in 70s China Detente & Opening, is a must-read on missteps of Containment ie Hostile Coexistence. "Guesstimates, conjectures,a priori reasoning from dubious assumptions, media-generated hallucinations are reiterated so often that they are taken as facts"
"few in the US seem to be considering the possibility that antagonism to China’s rise might end up harming the US & its Asian security partners more than it does China. Or that... it could even lead to a devastating trans-Pacific nuclear exchange" chasfreeman.net/on-hostile-coe…
"In 2017, a meme was born in a think tank in N India: Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’. This meme quickly spread through the media, intelligence circles & Western govts....it generated nearly 2M search results on Google"
The rise of a meme ht @D_Brautigam tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
The rise of a meme ht @D_Brautigam tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Johns Hopkins SAIS database on Chinese lending to Africa analyses "more than 1000 loans &, so far, in Africa, we have not seen any examples where we would say the Chinese deliberately entangled another country in debt" or extracted advantages/seized assets sais-cari.org/data-chinese-l…
65% in Kenya, 67% in Ghana & 85% in Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, had favourable views of China. Why? The BRI fits into other countries’ development. China has excess foreign-exchange, construction capacity,manuf & needs to invest these overseas tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Brahma Chellaney, Indian strategic expert at CPR (ex-Brookings, SAIS) was the Typhoid Mary of China 'debt-trap diplomacy' meme. This is his 2017 January piece alleging China's BRI as a geostrategic 'string of pearls' to encircle India that went viral. project-syndicate.org/commentary/chi…
'Cold War' was let loose by elite media in 2017. It put the planet towards our current climate & nuclear confrontation. Vignettes from early 2018's Agitprop blast from FT,FP. It mirrored Pentagon Natl Security Strategy analysed here adamtooze.com/2017/12/24/not…
