Keren Zhu on the global impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative
"A local researcher stepped to the podium, pointed a finger at me, and exclaimed: 'All Chinese should leave the country.'”
While some experts describe China’s presence in the Global South as an alternative model of foreign aid, others use terms such as “debt trap diplomacy.”
This week at Public Seminar, we’re returning to Keren Zhu’s account of how the Chinese-financed Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway, the country’s largest infrastructure project since independence, came to divide locals. “Everyone was happy,” Zhu writes, “until the new railroad was launched.”
The New Silk Road
Keren Zhu
Unfortunately, the benefits of the new railway were distributed unevenly across different sectors. For example, the tourism sector benefited from railway development because, with the introduction of the railway, there was a boom in domestic travelers using the affordable railway to travel across Kenya. Other sectors of the economy, however, suffered. That was in part because some previous car and bus passengers chose the railway as their preferred mode of transportation. More importantly, to increase railway revenue and repay the debt owed to the Chinese government, the Kenyan government issued a government gazette that required a large proportion of businesses to use the railway for goods transportation, thus siphoning an important part of the revenue from the road sector to the rail sector. As a result, many small businesses, such as the motels, eateries, vendors, and pharmacies along the road, suffered, resulting in a decline of the informal local economy.
Cities and towns rose and fell as a result. For example, a town that used to be a busy stopover on the road between Mombasa and Nairobi has now become a ghost town. The dynamics shifted between cities also due to distributive politics. By changing the goods-clearing facilities from the Mombasa port to the capital in Nairobi, Mombasa and its logistics-related sectors rapidly declined, whereas the capital’s economic interests were strengthened.