{"id":39211,"date":"2018-10-16T06:53:49","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T11:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39211"},"modified":"2018-10-16T06:53:49","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T11:53:49","slug":"lies-damn-lies-statistics-how-the-us-weaponizes-them-to-accuse-china-of-debt-trap-diplomacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39211","title":{"rendered":"Lies, Damn Lies &#038; Statistics: How the US Weaponizes Them to Accuse \u00a0China of Debt Trap Diplomacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/10\/16\/lies-damn-lies-statistics-how-the-us-weaponizes-them-to-accuse-china-of-debt-trap-diplomacy\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Lies, Damn Lies &amp; Statistics: How the US Weaponizes Them to Accuse \u00a0China of Debt Trap Diplomacy<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<p>With China and Russia named as the two greatest threats to continuing American hegemony end of last year, the velvet gloves have come off the Washington establishment, baring their knuckles against the Middle Kingdom in plain view of the entire world. In recent weeks, anti-China rhetorics and vitriol emanating from the Oval Office and Capitol Hill have reached feverish, even hysterical, proportions.<\/p>\n<p>The total warfare on all fronts is being waged against Beijing, assisted and amplified by the corporate media. The empire\u2019s propaganda machine is in overdrive, churning out fake news and lies on a 24\/7 basis to smear and demonize China. One of such lies is the alleged neo-colonization of developing countries through debt traps sprung by China.<\/p>\n<p>This article puts together all the numbers in four countries \u2013 Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Maldives and Malaysia \u2013 which are misrepresented by the western press as victims of China\u2019s \u201cdebt trap diplomacy\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><strong>SRI LANKA<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Lie : Western media have spun tall tales that Sri Lanka, with Chinese loans up to its eyeballs, used 90% of government revenue to service Chinese debts and was forced to \u201ccough up a port\u201d to Beijing.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Fact : China accounted for only ONE-EIGHTH of Sri Lanka\u2019s $65 billion debts. Beijing didn\u2019t demand immediate payment of loans falling due from Colombo. Instead, China acceded to Sri Lanka\u2019s request to restructure the loans. Colombo OFFERED to settle the loans past due by giving a 70% equity in the LOSS-MAKING Hambantota port to a Chinese company. To bring the port up to the operational level, the Chinese company has to spend another $700 million. No competing offer from other parties to take over the port was received before and after the restructuring proposal was completed.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lies, Damn Lies &amp; Statistics: How the US Weaponizes Them to Accuse \u00a0China of Debt Trap Diplomacy With China and Russia named as the two greatest threats to continuing American hegemony end of last year, the velvet gloves have come off the Washington establishment, baring their knuckles against the Middle Kingdom in plain view of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[10013,130,5493,190,195,21555,418,434,2864,694,2207,2084,827,22338,5027],"class_list":["post-39211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-american-hegemony","tag-china","tag-counterpunch","tag-data","tag-debt","tag-gerry-brown","tag-imf","tag-international-monetary-fund","tag-lies","tag-russia","tag-sri-lanka","tag-statistics","tag-united-states","tag-weaponized-data","tag-western-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39212,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39211\/revisions\/39212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}