US President Joe Biden has convinced the rest of the G7 leaders, meeting at a summit in Carbis Bay (UK), to launch a major infrastructure plan to counter China’s advance.
The group’s leaders agreed on Saturday to launch “Build Back Better for the world,” an initiative that seeks to “respond to the tremendous infrastructure needs in low- and middle-income countries,” the White House reported. it’s a statement.
Specifically, the plan will be aimed at nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Indo-Pacific.
The plan is intended to be an alternative to the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” project, which aims to revitalize the Silk Road by modernizing infrastructure and telecommunications to improve connectivity between Asia and Europe.
The US government indicated that its infrastructure initiative is a collaboration between large democracies to carry out a project guided by “values, with high standards and transparency.”
High-ranking officials of the United States Executive said in a telephone conversation with journalists that this proposal seeks a way to offer something to the developing world, but that it does not want to “force countries to make a choice.”
“It is not just about confronting or confronting China,” said a senior Biden administration official. “But so far we have not offered a positive alternative that reflects our values, our standards and the way we do business.”
“It’s more of a kind of recognition that there is still a huge infrastructure gap globally,” he explained.
The plan “helps narrow the more than $ 40 trillion in infrastructure needs that the developing world needs by 2035, and which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the White House said.
The US proposal aims to mobilize capital from the private sector to promote projects in four areas: climate, health security, digital technology and gender equality, in addition to having investments from financial institutions.
Biden is putting the spotlight on China, vying for world hegemony against the United States, during this summit of the leaders of the world’s most industrialized democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan. plus the European Union.
White House officials acknowledged in the conversation that there have been “some differences of opinion” among G7 leaders on “how strong” the action against Beijing should be.
They assured that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has supported Biden, along with the head of the Canadian Government, Justin Trudeau, and French President Emmanuel Macron.
But officials stressed that “there is a broad spectrum of agreement on ideas to do something different from an infrastructure point of view and launch a positive offer for the developing world.”
Earlier, a high-ranking official in the Washington Administration had criticized the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” plan in statements to journalists, considering its lack of transparency, poor labor and environmental standards and allegedly leaving many countries in a worse situation.
The China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a multi-billion dollar infrastructure scheme that Xi launched in 2013, involving development and investment initiatives that would spread from Asia to Europe and beyond.
More than 100 countries have signed agreements with China to cooperate on BRI projects such as railways, ports, roads and other infrastructure.
Critics say that creating a modern version of the old trade route is a vehicle for the expansion of communist China. Beijing says such doubts betray the “imperial hangover” of many Western powers that humiliated China for centuries.
In parallel, Biden is pressing the G7 to take “concrete action” against “forced labor” in northwest China’s Xinjiang province, where the Uighur minority lives.
The president wants it to “be made clear to the world that we believe that these practices are an affront to human dignity and an outrageous example of unfair economic competition from China,” the US source remarked.
With information from Reuters and EFE
