This is CBS High in the World. I'm John Bats with my colleague and friend Gordon Chang

at Gordon G. Chang, financial times headline, striking given the run up to the Belt and Road

domination of the last decade. China hit by surge in Belt and Road bad loan, subhead.

Global finance scheme becomes millstone for Beijing as 78 billion renegotiated to written

off in the past three years. Gordon, this program was Xi Jinping's major selling point,

the last decade, and the understanding was these loans were meant to influence, if not dominate,

and Asians with weak prosperity prospects on their own, building a network around the

world, railroads, roads, pipelines around the world that would please China to bring itself

to market. Now we're hearing bad loans. We could have told them that initially Gordon,

Sri Lanka for example, or Pakistan. No ability to repay loans, giving them money like

this was guaranteed to disrupt for a while, but then again, they would turn their pockets out.

How is this regarded in China today, Gordon? Is this a blow to the confidence in Xi Jinping,

or will nothing stop the man now elected for the third term? For the last couple of years,

John, there has been a noticeable de-emphasis in Belt and Road in internal propaganda in China,

and I think that that is largely because people saw this coming. They realized that

Belt and Road was building infrastructure that the private sector did not want to build because

it wasn't bankable. People knew that there were going to be enormous amounts of bad debts,

which have now occurred. I think that essentially this is not a bright spot for Xi Jinping.

Look at the country's Gordon. Just the names of them tell you that the prospects of repayment

were slight, bad governance, bad prospects, geopolitical dynamism that failed.

Belarus, a dictatorship under the boot of the Kremlin. Lebanon at Civil War,

Ghana, Sri Lanka, I mentioned Sri Lanka, Zambia, Argentina, 104 percent inflation. The IMF

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