China spent $240 billion to bailout ‘BRI countries’ I Report

China launched the Belt and Road initiative with much fanfare in 2013. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s pet project, BRI is a vast collection of development and investment initiatives originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure. In the decade since its launch, it expanded to Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. While China saw it as an opportunity to increase its economic and military clout. Developing nations saw it as an opportunity to benefit from the resulting physical infra-based connectivity with international markets, and job growth through BRI construction projects among other things. But according to a recent report, BRI has become a sinkhole for China as it spent $240 billion since 2008 just on bailing out 'BRI countries'.