There’s going to be plenty of bumps on the Belt and Road Initiative, and two of the biggest are terrorism and espionage. From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:
The past decade saw an unprecedented influx of Chinese capital into infrastructure investments, but the police, military, and intelligence services haven’t scaled their anti-terrorist capabilities accordingly. This isn’t due to those institutions’ lack of professionalism, but is purely the result of misguided priorities.
The “Baloch Liberation Army” (BLA) claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack against the Gwadar Port Authority complex in that eponymous southwestern Pakistani town last week. The targeted area represents the terminal point of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is the Belt & Road Initiative’s (BRI) flagship project into which an estimated $62 billion is thought to have been invested thus far. The People’s Republic had lofty hopes of CPEC, but it’s yet to take off and might never will.
On paper, this megaproject links China with Africa, Europe, and West Asia without having to transit through the Strait of Malacca, which could be blockaded by the US Navy in the event of a crisis. In practice, however, it only functions as a means of electrifying and industrializing Pakistan with Chinese capital. The reality is that CPEC’s ambitious geo-economic vision never materialized due to a combination of Pakistani corruption and especially that country’s growing security challenges.
The second of these problems forms the focus of the present piece. It’s very worrisome that Pakistan’s military-intelligence services have yet to secure CPEC’s terminal port in BRI’s flagship project despite a full decade’s worth of trying. To be sure, it’s impossible to stop every terrorist attack, but the fact that this latest one targeted the Gwadar Port Authority complex shows that security remains insufficient. The terrorists infiltrated that town undetected despite it being surrounded by barren wasteland.
Remember when everybody freaked out over that Shrubya Bush plan to let Saudi Arabia guard some ports?
Invade/Invite has never made any sense.
Will China be gracious or go colonial on their hosts?
There is the all so tiresome video where a Chinese man asks why did you tear up the tracks and other infrastructure to the local African, Not Sure of what country they are in.