Just to remind people, most sane countries do this for soft power. You want influence and dependency on your markets, it’s way way better than whatever short term gain you get from taxing you own people for imports.
Same for USAID, it’s in all competing countries to fill that void and gain that goodwill since it also makes you safer and less prone to terrorism or influx of migrants at your doorstep.
Edit, I should add China is one of the more aggressive tarrif countries on developed countries, but even that’s stuff like 6%, not fucking 30%+, plus they have more strategic reason to do so.
USAID was a tool to destabilize opposition not stabilize it. It is one of the primary causes of migrants.
Wait US tarriffed Israel wtf?
But not Russia. Trump has his priorities.
Neither Cuba, or the DPRK. Instead, heavy sanctions are already in place.
What’s the point of tariffing a country that you’re not trading with because you’ve sanctioned it?
We still trade $3.5 B with Russia. https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/trump-tariffs-russia-ukraine-ceasefire
That’s much bigger than many of the countries on the list like Madagascar, Laos, Camaroon, Chad, Jordan, Malawi, Vantua, Brunai, Kazakstan, and more.
The counter to that argument are places like Syria where there’s a tarrif and sanctions, or again those islands with just penguins that clearly don’t do trade. They simply ran an AI slop algorithm then excluded Russia just because.
*knows his limits
From December of last year, China eliminated its tariffs on 43 countries listed as least developed by the UN
Weren’t a lot of those countries also targeted by them for their Belt and Road program that’s ended up being quite exploitive?
The purpose of BRI is to industrialize countries and build up new customers for the products China makes. They are doing it for their own benefit, sure, but it isn’t done in a manner that’s exploitative. Compare that to Western Countries, where brutal IMF loans come with requirements to sell off and privatize nationalized industries and resources (commonly oil or rare Earth), and claims of exploitation from China are merely there to protect the validity of the Western IMF loans. After all, why would anyone take a Western loan if the Chinese loans and programs are usually on much better terms? You’ll find that the Global South is quite aware of this and is thus turning from the West and towards China.
The Atlantic: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth | The narrative wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with.
Belt and road isn’t exploitative, but I’m curious where you heard that it was.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67120726
It’s a debt-trap for poor countries. It isn’t so black and white as that, but they aren’t doing such a massive, expensive gamble as charity. Countries are already struggling to repay the money they’ve borrowed, along with pressure from China to give up a lot of land rights and ownership.
The main goal of BRI is to usurp the USD and dominate supply chains and resources.
Kinda silly to be using the Western state funded media BBC, a glorified propaganda outlet, as a genuine source on China (they have been known to tell literal lies and forge information about China).
Either way, you’re correct, it isn’t charity, countries don’t work that way. It isn’t a debt trap either though, the loans don’t come with the excessive interest rates Western Loans do, and don’t come with requirements to privatize nationalized resources like Oil for foregin plundering like Western Loans do. On top of this, Chinese loans are frequently forgiven.
Why are they doing it? To build up customers as an alternative to US consumers. They want allies and people who will buy their stuff that aren’t constantly threatening war.
Waiting for international cooperation to soley benefit the party recieving it, ie charity, as the only legitimate form of cooperation and all else exploitation is hopelessly naive.
Your mistake here (apart from taking billionaire owned CIA financed BBC seriously) is assuming that since China is benefiting from this therefore the other countries must be losing to compensate. That’s wholly incorrect.
These projects industrialize and develop the partner countries, which help them capture more of the added value of what they sell and improve standards of living for the populations.
You also misunderstand what China want from giving all these loans. China isn’t doing that to get land right and ownership, it they wanted that, it would be much simpler and much easier to just buy them. No, what China wants from this is markets. Every time they make it easier to transport goods by helping build railways or roads, every time they help create jobs by building factories, every time they improve standards of living with new hospital and infrastructure, it makes more peoples becoming able to buy what China sells, more businesses that China can invest in, and it makes countries want to continue have good relations with them, which means potential for trade agreement, lesser tariffs, potential alliances, and more. That is what China is doing all of this for, as long as they get it -which they are- they couldn’t care less if they don’t get the loan money paid back.
The loans China is giving these countries are in Euros or USD, not in Chinese currency. Why? Because it’s risk free this way. Compared to what China gets from their gargantuan trade surplus with the west, the loan money they are giving is basically nothing to them. No, really. Take the price of any one thing China has given loan money for, I can guaranty it costed them no more than what they get out of a measly few days of trade with the Eurozone alone, if even that. It’s not a big deal to them if they lose that money, they’ll have made it back by the week after they lent it, probably sooner. Which is why, contrary to what you may have read, China very often forgive these loans i.e. the countries who got lent the money don’t have to pay anything back.
The main goal of BRI is to usurp the USD and dominate supply chains and resources.
Right, the communist anti-imperialists are trying to be the new imperialists, you see.
