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This is a completely false narrative. The IMF is a lender of last resort. Countries only go to it to borrow when they absolutely need money and have nowhere else to go. And for obvious reasons, when countries are in such desperate straits that literally no private or public entity will lend money to them, the IMF requires fairly stringent rules so their leaders don’t just pocket the money and run away, or don’t spend it on buying elections, as opposed to rebuilding the economy. The reason the IMF has refused to allow Pakistan to draw down money from its IMF loans is because under the Imran Khan govt they spent it on oil subsidies and allowing arbitrage on the Pakistani currency (interesting that if as you say the IMF is a tool used by the west to control countries, they are the ones saying no to a country borrowing from the country, while the country is going out of its way to get money from the IMF). It’s not a surprise that countries that can literally not raise funds from any private or public entities are expected to endure financial restraint (since it was the lack of restraint that brought them there in the first place). But the Belt and Road loans were not to desperate countries desperately looking for funds. The Belt and Road initiative was for countries, which at the time were financially stable. Their leaders figured that getting sparkly Chinese infrastructure investment would boost their re-election chances. And as a bonus, unlike the World Bank funds (which is the correct equivalent to the BRI loans), the Chinese didn’t require you to prove the economic viability of the projects, they didn’t require you to raise additional private capital for the project, and most importantly, the Chinese had absolutely no qualms about their companies personally bribing the leaders of the recipient companies tens of millions of dollars. In return, all these countries’ leaders had to agree to was paying higher interest rates, not creating local jobs because the Chinese would export their own workers, and not building local businesses because Chinese companies would get all the contracts. But that was a future leader and citizens’ problem, while they could stash the cool Chinese payoffs in London and Dubai. |
The BRI is sort of like a hybrid merger of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (in reality controlled and managed by Japan) aimed at LDCs in Asia+Africa which Japan+SK wouldn't touch (either because it's not within Asia, or it's not financially viable).
The same way the ADB would subcontract with Japanese corporations, you'd see BRI contract to Chinese corporations.
That said, the ADB tended to train+hire local staff, while BRI projects tended to mainly hire solely Chinese. And conversely, the ADB would add additional regulations+scrutiny into potential malpractices, malfeasance, and financial viability while BRI financed projects were much more lax with such compliance.