This episode of Democracy IRL is a companion piece to Michael Bennon and Francis Fukuyama's essay, "China's Road to Ruin," published in the September/October 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Here, Bennon and Fukuyama discuss how bad Chinese Belt and Road projects are, leading to financial crises in developing countries, and how international financial institutions like the IMF and EBRD are being asked to bail out dodgy Chinese loans.

Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at CDDRL for the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Michael's research interests include infrastructure policy, project finance, public-private partnerships, and institutional design in the infrastructure sector. Michael also teaches Global Project Finance to graduate students at Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Michael served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers for five years, leading Engineer units, managing projects, and planning for infrastructure development in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Thailand.

Democracy IRL is produced by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University.

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China's Road to Ruin, with Michael Benno...