I'm John Bachelors with my colleague Ronan Wordsworth. He is a reporter on Africa for the

geopolitical futures of subscription site I hardly recommend.

China, the Belt and Road.

It hasn't worked out for many of the countries across Asia,

and I read from Ronan it hasn't worked out in Africa either but China doesn't leave the scene easily

What is China doing now after Belt and Road is put away put back on the shelf? What is the US and France doing about China's presence? We have a couple of minutes.

Yeah, so if we look at the trend for China back in the early years of the 2010s,

their expenditure on Belton Road was humongous and that has gradually

scaled back to almost nothing now.

And I think in the early days China believes that they need to spend this money to get access to resources and to sign contracts with governments.

But then in actual fact, they were able to keep access to these resources even without necessarily providing the infrastructure that they promised through Dalton Road.

So they didn't see it necessarily as extremely important.

They undertook smaller projects which were much cheaper for them and still were able to

garner the results that they wanted, which was to get access to many of these raw materials.

So I know we've been talking about the DRC for a long time now,

but that's a good example where under the Belson Road they promised huge infrastructure

investment, but this never materialized.

And yet, China is by far the main extractor of raw materials from the DRC to fuel its battery

production operations back in China.

And even the President, Felix Dixehiel, he pointed this out just a few months back and said that he wanted to renegotiate the terms and conditions that China was able to access these mines because DRC is not getting a good deal at all for their minerals.

And I think this situation has kind of been repeated across the content a little bit where there hasn't been this really effective

expenditure. Instead, we've seen China building things like parliamentary buildings, new areas for government

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