https://ghostarchive.org/archive/4fZTD?wr=false

ROME, July 23 (Reuters) - Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who will visit the White House on Thursday, said that U.S. President Joe Biden had never challenged her on the issue of Rome being part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Meloni leads the only major Western country to have joined China’s BRI scheme, which envisions rebuilding the old Silk Road to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond with large infrastructure spending.

“The president of the United States has never directly raised the question with me,” she told a news conference following an international meeting on migration in Rome.

The deal was signed in 2019 under the administration of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, drawing criticism from Washington and Brussels, and Italy is highly unlikely to renew it when it expires early next year.

It has produced little benefit for Italy over the past four years, with exports to China totalling 16.4 billion euros ($18.1 billion) last year from 13 billion euros in 2019.

  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf
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    1 year ago

    I wonder why then, if it’s a debt trap, China has such a better record of forgiving foreign loans than other countries and institutions? The IMF requires economic control for their loans, including such stipulations as the privatization of public infrastructure, dismantling of labor laws, and lowering of minimum wages in their loans on a regular basis. I’ve not heard of any such requirements from Chinese loans, and in fact billions of dollars of loans were forgiven during the Covid-19 crisis. Why is there no criticism of the IMF loan regime and its fundamentally exploitative loans? The whole criticism reeks of orientalist hysteria to me.