The belt and road 'strategy', in practice, meant Chinese companies using Chinese workers to build random bits of infrastructure (roads, ports, railways) in less

The belt and road 'strategy', in practice, meant Chinese companies using Chinese workers to build random bits of infrastructure (roads, ports, railways) in less-developed countries, after Chinese state agencies lent the money for them to those countries. The things built are mostly not well used (and unsuited to the local country, being designed to serve Chinese-licensed mines or similar), and the loans are looking fairly shaky. There's antipathy in the victim countries because the promised jobs for the locals never eventuated, or worse, they were hired and then sacked in short order. One commentator said something along the lines of "rather than 5-dimensional chess it looks more like financial naïveté, and a soft power disaster."