{"id":271026,"date":"2019-04-25T04:42:37","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T04:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/?p=271026"},"modified":"2019-04-25T04:59:13","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T04:59:13","slug":"chinas-belt-and-road-is-shrinking-it-may-be-bad-news-for-us-and-allies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/chinas-belt-and-road-is-shrinking-it-may-be-bad-news-for-us-and-allies\/","title":{"rendered":"China&#8217;s Belt and Road is shrinking; it may be bad news for US and allies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>China\u2019s globe-spanning infrastructure program is shrinking. The rhetoric at the second Belt and Road Forum, opening in Beijing on Thursday, is almost certain to be less triumphalist &#8212; and new plans for roads, pipelines, bridges and rail lines more modest &#8212; than at the first. Unfortunately for the US and its allies, though, a downsized program could pose more, not less of a competitive threat to the West. <\/p>\n<p>Until now, most worries about the Belt and Road have focused on its size and its weak standards. The sheer volume of the supposedly multi-trillion-dollar initiative looked impossible to match. Meanwhile, a corrosive combination of debt, corruption and privileged access for Chinese companies threatened to lure or coerce countries away from the US orbit and into China\u2019s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China\u2019s globe-spanning infrastructure program is shrinking. The rhetoric at the second Belt and Road Forum, opening in Beijing on Thursday, is almost certain to be less triumphalist &#8212; and new plans for roads, pipelines, bridges and rail lines more modest &#8212; than at the first. Unfortunately for the US and its allies, though, a downsized program could pose more, not less of a competitive threat to the West. Until now, most worries about the Belt and Road have focused on its size and its weak standards. The sheer volume of the supposedly multi-trillion-dollar initiative looked impossible to match. Meanwhile, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,130,168],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-standard-newspapers","category-newspapers","category-roads-business-standard-newspapers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}