i think that india and china are taking what both need here.
india needs: infrastructure with financing it can afford.
china needs: an experimental area to gain additional infrastructure experience in difficult logistics conditions - overseas, mountain, and urban construction to gain reputation and practice.
both win.
Disagree.
China doesn't need "an experimental area to gain additional infrastructure experience in difficult logistics conditions - overseas, mountain, and urban construction to gain reputation and practice"
Go to skyscrapers.com, then you'll see endless extreme engineering projects that Chinese engineers have accompalished in China, i.e. dam, roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, etc etc. India is largely a flat terrace. China doesn't need more of those, in fact every engineers/workers have all very limited effective working span, why waste them in India for a dollar or two?
This is almost the same as what I commented earlier on Huawei's $500m project. They are all very much short-sighted to earn some easy money taking advantage of India's low labour cost; in the long run, they are building up some fiece low-price competitors.
Indians are renouned for their "conning techniques". Once you invest heavily in that country, you are subject to its corruption and notoriously inefficient red tape. Any indian offical can easily hold you and your profit margin, already thin, in hostage at any unexpected turn. e.g. UK's Vodafone recently just unexpectedly "lossed" a legal battle in India and ordered to pay up 1.5 billion pound to Indian govt as tax, leaving its profit margin in severe Jepardy.
What OP says is absolutely correct: more importantly, what China iashelping to build in India is more dangerous than what the West has done to China fundamentally speaking:
This is because the world's natural resource is very precious and limited. Financing large infrastructures also requires deep pockets that most countries in the world don't have (e.g. look at even today's UK, US's domestic railway system, then you know) .
Hard-to-built first-class Infrastructure is the foundation to build up a nation and to attract FDI, is one of the reasons why China has been developing so fast and so succeful as it is
the only one in the developing world who has such a shining infras.
Without China, India could
never have done the infras. A western project engineer who worked for 2 dacades across the world including India once said that "India could never build up its infras on its own. The people there just can't do it... The West only can bid , and only are interested in bidding, a small range of projects there."
By helping India doing so, China is wasting limited natural resource (without such projects, India would not have bought more natural resource in the world market, competing with China's bids again in areas), wasting her own precious human resources ( some say that China is already facing labour shortage), helping the foundation of likely fiece future competitor in low-end of all markets ( when India's infras is at same level as China's, Pakistan is as good as dead, and plus most of China's dominance on low-end markets, their corresponding FDI, and employments will go to India straightway, hurting China's economy in the long run, even though China's mid-high end markets shall largely be intact).
Building excellent infras at low cost in a quick way is actually one of China's key national competitive advantages. It's stupid , shorted sighted, and it's suicidal, in such an uncertain global environement, to "give" this key advantage away volunteerily almost for free , to a very hostile(even deadly) neighbour whose govt is buying tons of world class weaponaries and repeatedly point China as its #1 national threat.
In return, India hates China for it ( remember Chinese engineers have been blindly blamed and charged for a recent project accident? more of such a case would happen in future) , and ironically India will become stronger, relatively speaking, and thus more deadly to the life of every single Chinese soldier stationed at border conflict zone, precisely because of China's help.
@conworldsus: absolutely agree with your OP!
