Editor's note: This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). What benefits has the initiative brought to partner countries? What is the logic behind the smear campaign by some American and European media? In this episode of Reality Check, former British MP George Galloway shares his thoughts on the BRI. The views expressed in the video are his own and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Resources exploited; sovereignty lost; people bullied… This is what China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) looks like in the Western media.For them, the BRI is a synonym for "predator" and "interference."

America has 29 military bases in Africa. China has one – in Djibouti – which also hosts an American military base. Yet the U.S. claims it is China that's interfering on the continent. 

It's true that China is building the railroad throughout Africa – the one that Joe Biden dreams that America will build – and that American leaders routinely denounce Chinese interference in Africa having landed there at an African airport built by China and driven into town along a highway, also built by China.

But then that's not interference. Is it?

That's called development.

China is in Africa helping to build the infrastructure that the European colonialists never built, and to help build the independent economic post-colonial future that the West did everything possible to try and strangle at birth.

China enslaved nobody in Africa; that was the West.

China occupied nowhere in Africa; that was the West which scrambled for every last square inch of the continent.

China murdered no African leaders; that was the West.

China couped no African government; that was the West, from Libya to Timbuktu, through Liberia to the Congo too.

China never supported apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa; that was the West.

To the contrary, China supported the freedom struggle in both.

It wasn't China that insisted on a price of 80 cents per kilogram when the market price was 200 euros per kilogram for uranium from Niger. Again, that was the West.

China's Belt and Road Initiative is paving Africa with road, rail and aviation infrastructure, building schools, hospitals, universities and kindergartens.

The West seeks to suck the blood from Africans as they have done for centuries. China is transfusing hope.

That's the difference between China and the West.

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