Designed to dwarf even the Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe after World War II, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first unveiled by President Xi Jinping in a 2013 speech at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Beijing later pledged to invest US$1 trillion, and by some estimates as much as $8 trillion, […]

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Last week, eight Chinese-made light attack jets sat on a half-finished runway at Ban Keun, flanked by more than two dozen military support vehicles, offering the first aerial glimpse of a new Chinese-Lao military facility north of the Lao capital, Vientiane. The speed of the buildup and the earthmoving visible around the airstrip in the […]

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