Erik Bethel

to their security apparatus in airports all over the world, to port scanning equipment, to the port cranes, like 75% of the world's cranes are ZPMC cranes, with

Very likely.

I'll qualify that with backdoors that can stop working.

And so China is exporting its techno-authoritarianism around the world.

And for some governments, it's like catnip, right?

If you want to stay in power forever, if you're a random dictator somewhere, China can help enable that.

Or why not just give you, you know, why not give every politician in the country a Bank of China debit card and, hey, you know, buddy, it's on us.

You know, you want to buy a Lamborghini, invite your family to a trip to Europe, come to Beijing, it's on us.

Don't worry about it.

So China created 10 or 12, 13 years ago, something called the One Belt, One Road Initiative.

And the premise was to build arteries to and from China, physical arteries like highways, airports, infrastructure,

maritime ports and the like and railways railways especially telecom infrastructure um and the way it works is you know i think of it as predatory lending so they'll go to a given country and say hey we'll lend you china we'll graciously lend you whatever a billion dollars to do whatever uh but the fine print says if you can't pay well we'll take your port

And clearly that has met with a significant amount of resistance.

So in the case of, I'll give you a few examples.

One is Djibouti, where the Chinese lent a very large amount of money, and now China has a military base there.

The second place that comes to mind is- Right across from the US base, actually.

Right across from the US base.

Is it really?

Yeah.

The next is Sri Lanka, where they built a port.