CHINA AND THE WORLD

I come from a place that depends on tourism too. There are geographic and cultural attractions that make it attractive.

I'm learning the extent to which related infrastructure development is being aggressively promoted by China. A major highway system, similar to transportation systems in Africa, with many similar homogenizing (and other "negative" cultural) effects foreclose potential localized systems that are or could be stable, given the right attention.

Although these third world places aren't taking advantage of local resources, the Chinese program is making sure they never will. One example would be creating a bypass highway that cuts off a slumbering/festering town from the water. A different investment emphasis could have gone to figuring out and educating around a local economy built around access to the the shore (or could it have?). That local economy might best have been served by the coastal-tourism resources the highway is foreclosing on. (There might be workarounds that are less direct than those foreclosed on and that precluded pedestrian "circulation," thereby promoting more complexity.) Any jobs that the highway promotes will require driving, and will have to be dependent on the high-end economic system the Chinese infrastructure is geared toward. I imagine that Chinese debt is behind all major building...like the proliferating African megacities, and, in my case, all-inclusive-hotel construction. These high end places are very unlikely to employ the majority of the population in most instances.

So while these third world places that are being swept away by Chinese construction are incapable of financing an alternative local economy, the one financed by China is forcing them into irrevocable over dependence on complexity, as well as on increased economic disparity.