there is a sense that perhaps china's approach to developing nations has been political, and the intentions are not pure. why is china in these countries building railways, building infrastructure? i think the most credible story is that china had a lot of excess capacity in its construction firms in about 2013, when it started the belt and road project. this excess capacity was exported to the rest of the world in order to generate revenue for china, and their construction firms. and also to build trade ties with the rest of the world. there have been some concerns about transparency in these projects, whether they have been given sufficient due diligence or not, which is hard to tell, particularly because china approves so many of these projects annually. but it has been quite helpful to many countries,