Biden persuades the G7 to launch a massive infrastructure plan against China

US President Joe Biden persuaded the rest of the G7 leaders, assembled at the Carbis Bay Summit (United Kingdom), to launch a master infrastructure plan to counter China’s advance.

In this sense, G7 leaders agreed on Saturday to launch the “Rebuilding Better for the World” (Rebuilding Better for the World) initiative to “respond to the enormous infrastructure needs in middle and high-income countries,” the White House said in a statement.

The plan wants to be an alternative to the Chinese project “One Belt, One Road” (Road, Belt), which aims to revitalize the so-called Silk Road by modernizing infrastructure and communications to improve connectivity between Asia and Europe.

The US government has indicated that its Infrastructure Initiative is a collaboration between large democracies to implement a project guided by “high values, standards, and transparency.”

The White House said the plan “helps narrow the more than $40 trillion in infrastructure needs of the developing world, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The US proposal aims to mobilize capital from the private sector to promote projects in four areas: climate, health security, digital technology and gender equality, in addition to having investments from financial institutions.

Biden highlights China, which is vying for world domination against the United States, during this summit of the leaders of the world’s most industrialized democracies (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan, in addition to the European Union).

Earlier, a high-ranking official in the Washington administration criticized China’s “One Belt, One Road” plan in statements to reporters, considering its lack of transparency and poor labor and environmental standards, and claimed that it left many countries in a worse situation.

In parallel, Biden is pressing the G7 to take “concrete measures” against “forced labor” in China’s northwest Xinjiang province, where the Uyghur minority lives.

The US source noted that the president wants to “make it clear to the world that we believe these practices are an affront to human dignity and an outrageous example of unfair economic competition from China.”