China wouldn't want to be a second-rate bully. In fact, it has stepped up its bullying in South China Sea (SEA nations), East China Sea (Japan, Taiwan), its borders with India, and the downstream countries of the Mekong River (Mainland SEA nations). You think US is a bully, you've never seen China in action.

China has provided infrastructure loans to the philippines with conditions like: china brings in their chinese construction companies together with their own chinese workers. The only local workers there are filipino engineers that does liaison work between the chinese contractors and local partner company. So, no, the Belt-n-Road initiative does not build local ability, not in the philippines at least.

an alternative to window smashing and jar breaking jobs would be like what china did: build elegant ghost towns and ghost cities. that way, society produces something of value (in some future time, at least) and provides jobs as well, albeit, again at the expense of the taxpayer.

Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).


I was hoping to right click on the IEBlog link to a feed you gave in hope that I can Add it to my Live Bookmarks in firefox but, alas, there's no such thing.

No, the 'Bookmark this link...' function is not good for XML feeds.

Maybe this could be a good feature-request,eh?