China has spent billions in Africa, but some critics at home question why
BEIJING - China has promoted its huge global infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative, with dancing children singing a propaganda pop song, an animated rap and TV bedtime stories with tinkly background music on how "it helps everyone."
"We'll share the goodness now, the Belt and Road is how," the children sing in a 2017 video about President Xi Jinping's foreign policy cornerstone.
But lately the government's big spending in Africa and elsewhere faces a growing domestic backlash.
"Why is China, a country with over 100 million people who are still living below the poverty line, playing at being the flashy big-spender?" a Tsinghua University law professor, Xu Zhangrun, wrote in a
