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By Prince Kapone – Jun 10, 2025
While China brings electricity, roads, and rail to the Global South, the imperial left brings its measuring tape—only to weep over wage gaps. But whose gap are they really mourning? And in whose name?
Bricks, Not Sermons: The Scale of Struggle in Concrete Terms
In the war for the future of the Global South, China is laying bricks while the West continues to drop bombs—and still, somehow, it’s China that gets scolded for not being charitable enough. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, has already funneled over $679 billion in infrastructure investment into Africa, Asia, and Latin America—compared to the United States’ paltry $76 billion in the same period. That is not a statistic; it is a revelation. It reveals who is building, who is breaking, and who is watching from a comfortable distance in the name of “solidarity.”
This explosion of Chinese investment, however, has stirred a curious response from some corners of the so‑called Western left. You won’t hear much about the thousands of miles of rail, the rural electrification projects extending power to communities long ignored by colonial grids, or the tens of thousands of local jobs created in construction, logistics, energy, and transport. What you’ll hear instead is a repetitive chorus: But what about the wage disparity? In Chinese-funded projects, they say, Chinese workers are often paid more than local laborers. This becomes their sticking point—not the IMF’s structural adjustment blackmail, not the French uranium extraction in Niger, not AFRICOM’s expansion. Just the fact that a Chinese welder might earn twice what a local worker earns on the same job.
Let’s be blunt: this is not anti-capitalist critique. This is imperial moralism in leftist drag. Because to focus on this disparity without context is to erase the entire structure of imperialist underdevelopment that these projects are beginning to overturn. It’s to weep over a symptom while ignoring the disease. It’s to cling to a fantasy of pure, abstract equality while the Global South claws its way out of centuries of looting and war.
This essay is an intervention. A scalpel against the smug, self-referential politics of the imperial left. We will dismantle the wage critique, reveal its ideological function, and re-center the only metric that matters: does the project empower the working class of the Global South? If it does, then let the critics scream. The bricks are still being laid.
On Whose Backs? The Material Realities Behind the Wage Gap
Let’s begin with the facts, because reality is always more grounded than ideology. In Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway project, a flagship BRI endeavor, protests emerged over disparities between Chinese and Kenyan workers. While precise monthly wage figures are inconsistent across sources, media reports indicate that Kenyan laborers were often paid between KES 400–700 per day (roughly $3–6), while Chinese workers—largely technical staff and engineers—earned significantly more. But what does this gap actually represent? Not racial hierarchy, not imperial disdain, but a layered combination of skill specialization, international relocation, and contractual negotiation—none of which is unique to China.
Chinese workers on overseas projects often fill roles that require years of technical training—rail engineers, tunneling specialists, energy grid architects. Their deployment comes with long-term contracts, typically lasting two to three years. These workers leave their families behind, live in isolated on-site dormitories, endure long hours, and navigate unfamiliar cultural terrains. Their contracts include relocation bonuses, per diems, risk pay, and housing allowances. In short: their higher wages reflect the cost of transnational labor deployment—just as it would for an American engineer posted to Afghanistan or a French technician working in Chad.
And here’s the kicker: despite this wage gap, the local workers on these projects are still earning more than they would in almost any other job in the domestic economy. While we lack consistently disaggregated wage data across all BRI projects, a SAIS-CARI study found that Chinese firms in Africa often paid better than local and other foreign firms in equivalent sectors. What the imperial left sees as inequality is, in the local material context, uplift. For millions of workers, these aren’t bad jobs. They’re the best jobs they’ve ever had.
Who Signs the Contracts? Sovereignty, Class, and the Local Bourgeoisie
One of the most dishonest elements in the wage disparity discourse is the implication that China unilaterally dictates pay scales. In reality, every infrastructure project—especially those under state-to-state BRI terms—is governed by a bilateral agreement. That means the wage structure is negotiated by the host government. If local workers are being underpaid relative to their needs, then the blame lies just as much with the national bourgeoisie as with the Chinese contractors.
Take Kenya again. The Kenyan state, eager to expedite financing and deliver visible progress, signed contracts that prioritized speed, cost, and capital inflows—often at the expense of stronger labor safeguards. According to researchers, labor protections for Kenyan workers on the Standard Gauge Railway were inconsistently enforced, with union representation limited and working conditions raising concern among local advocacy groups. But this was not imposed by China. It was a domestic ruling class decision made in service of capitalist priorities. If you want to fight for better wages on BRI projects, organize the working class to confront their own comprador elite, not to scapegoat China for the failures of postcolonial governance. Even European leaders have admitted that it wasn’t Chinese coercion—but domestic neoliberal policy—that transferred public assets into foreign hands. As Macron put it after meeting Xi in 2022: Europe must “reduce its dependence on the US and avoid being drawn into confrontation” to reclaim sovereignty and act as a “third power.”
And let’s be clear: the idea that Chinese firms should simply pay all workers the same, regardless of location, training, or negotiation, is not a revolutionary demand. It’s liberal utopianism—a dream of frictionless fairness without power struggle, without imperial history, and without sovereign differentiation. That dream dies the moment your shovel hits dirt.
Compared to What? Naming the Real Exploiters
Let’s turn the question back on the critics. If China is guilty of inequality because of a 2:1 wage ratio, what do we call the West’s 4:1, 6:1, even 10:1 wage disparities in the same regions?
During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, American contractors frequently earned hundreds of dollars per day for logistical and security support, while Iraqi workers performing similar work earned only a few dollars daily. In one documented case, a subcontractor charged the U.S. military $75 per bag of laundry while paying local workers as little as $12 per shift. The markup wasn’t just financial—it was colonial. Were the socialists in Brooklyn outraged then? Did they write op-eds about “wage apartheid” on Halliburton sites?
French uranium giant Areva (now Orano) has extracted massive wealth from Niger for decades. Independent sources confirm longstanding criticism that Nigerien miners have worked under unsafe conditions for wages far below a living standard, while the profits fueled France’s nuclear energy infrastructure. There’s no skill differential here. Just raw, racialized extraction. For instance, a ReliefWeb analysis highlights “unsafe working conditions and exposure to radioactive poisoning in the community” around Niger’s uranium mines. So where is the Western left’s fury? Where is their forensic investigation of European wage hierarchies? Silence is not neutrality—it’s complicity.
The reason these critics are louder about China is simple: China threatens to end Western monopoly over the Global South. That’s the real problem. The rest is ideological smoke.
Infrastructure as Class War: Who Builds, Who Bombs, and Who Complains
Infrastructure is not neutral. It is not apolitical, technocratic, or just another sector of economic development. It is a weapon—either of imperial domination or of sovereign defense. And that is precisely why China’s infrastructure projects attract such fury from the West. For the first time in modern history, nations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America are building without begging. They are laying roads, connecting ports, powering cities—and doing it without needing permission from the IMF, USAID, or the European Commission.
But if you listen to the imperial left, you’d think the problem isn’t that the West abandoned development—it’s that China didn’t do it nicely enough. That China’s engineers were paid too much. That the local workers didn’t get matching socks. That railroads built in four years should’ve taken ten.
This is where the real ideological function of the wage critique comes into focus. It doesn’t emerge from proletarian struggle. It emerges from the NGO-academic complex—a class formation fluent in moral posturing but allergic to material power. Many of the loudest critics of BRI projects aren’t workers, unions, or peasant associations. They’re Western-funded think tanks, university departments, and “civil society” monitors funded by the very governments that bombed Libya, starved Yemen, and sanctioned Venezuela.
These forces are not neutral observers. They are the ideological wing of imperialism. Their task is not to uplift—but to delegitimize. And their criticisms of Chinese projects mirror, almost verbatim, the talking points of the U.S. State Department: concerns about “unsustainable debt,” “neo-colonialism,” and “authoritarian development.” Yet none of these concerns are raised about the 78% of Global South debt held by Western financial institutions. None are aimed at the $100 billion in extractive infrastructure built by European oil companies. This is not critique. It’s counterinsurgency in academic form.
In fact, field research in Central Asia offers one of the sharpest rebukes to the anti-China hysteria peddled by both neoconservatives and the NGO-academic complex. A joint ethnographic project led by anthropologists Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Alessandro Rippa—published by Novastan—documents how many so-called BRI “debt traps” are mythical, and how Chinese projects often mirror or even outperform their Western counterparts. They emphasize that many of China’s flagship infrastructure developments, like the Karakoram Highway, predate the BRI by decades and were built on historic South-South solidarity—not extractive imperial design. These scholars dismantle the Orientalist myth that China is uniquely opaque or sinister, noting instead that Chinese firms often operate within—and alongside—global development frameworks, including international donors and co-financed infrastructure banks. The problem isn’t Chinese roads; it’s the fantasy that Western aid ever came without strings or bloodshed.
The Moral Optics of Empire: How Liberal Guilt Becomes Policy
Why does the Western left obsess over wage disparities in Chinese projects but say little about Areva’s uranium empire in Niger, or the EU’s agricultural subsidies that flood African markets with surplus corn and powdered milk, destroying local food systems and rural livelihoods? Why do they whisper about World Bank privatizations and shout about Chinese contractors paying too much to their own workers?
Because to confront Western exploitation would mean confronting their own governments, their own universities, their own careers. It would mean acknowledging that their lifestyle—every phone, every car, every Amazon order—is built on the backs of Global South labor. It’s easier to moralize from afar. To scold China for not being an ethical capitalist. To feign outrage over wage differences, all while paying taxes to fund NATO bombings.
This is what we call imperial moralism. It’s not grounded in solidarity, but in guilt. Guilt that gets transmuted into critique—but always aimed at the wrong target. Not at the empire they live in. But at the rival power challenging that empire’s dominance.
We must say it plainly: Western critiques of BRI labor practices that ignore the structural violence of Western imperialism are not leftist. They are a form of liberal colonialism—demanding that the Global South suffer ethically, develop slowly, and never use its alliances to escape imperial control.
China to Washington: ‘Latin America and Caribbean are Not Anyone’s Backyard’
From Moralism to Materialism: The Revolutionary Terrain of Multipolar Development
China’s development model is not perfect. It contains contradictions—wage hierarchies, environmental concerns, uneven bargaining between states and firms. But these are contradictions within the camp of anti-imperialist development, not between oppression and liberation. They are contradictions that arise from building under global capitalism while resisting its command center.
We are not moral arbiters. We are revolutionaries. Our task is not to grade China on a purity scale. It is to identify: where is imperialism dominant? And where is it being eroded? China’s infrastructure projects, despite their flaws, represent a rupture in the global system of dependency. They bring roads where the West brought drones. They build schools where the West built sweatshops. They offer finance without conditionality where the West offered debt traps—as noted in a Boston University analysis observing that China’s approach “lacks policy conditionality and fiscal austerity requirements of Western multilaterals.”
This broader multipolar shift is also reflected in the operations of the New Development Bank (NDB), the BRICS-led multilateral development bank headquartered in Shanghai. As documented by a Andrea Molinari and Rocío Ceballos, the NDB has expanded its mandate to support infrastructure, climate action, and sovereign development—though it still faces limitations in non-sovereign and local-currency financing. According to Reuters, the NDB has approved approximately $32.8 billion in loans and aims to increase local-currency lending from 22% to 30% by 2026. Its evolution signals a tectonic shift in the international financial architecture: not a rejection of multilateralism, but a reclamation of it by the Global South. The emergence of BRICS financial institutions like the NDB represents a concrete attempt to restructure global financing around Southern priorities—albeit unevenly, and with contradictions that must be resolved through class struggle, not abandonment.
And that is precisely why they are under attack. Not because they pay Chinese workers more—but because they pay anyone at all to build something that isn’t supervised by the empire.
So let us drop the measuring tape and pick up the shovel. Let us support development, even when it is uneven, so long as it points in the direction of sovereignty, dignity, and class power for the colonized.
Lines of Struggle: What a Revolutionary Position Actually Looks Like
To criticize without strategy is to serve the enemy. If we are to critique China’s overseas development model, it must not be on imperialism’s terms. It must come from the standpoint of internationalist class struggle—from the trenches of the Global South, not the seminar rooms of the Global North.
This means beginning with the fundamental question: Compared to what? Compared to IMF austerity? Compared to European multinationals paying pennies and dumping waste? Compared to decades of underdevelopment enforced by the very institutions now pretending to care about fair wages?
China’s infrastructure projects are not without contradictions. But these are contradictions against imperialism—not weapons of it. And in a world still ordered by colonial debt, imperial accumulation, and Western military domination, those contradictions must be resolved from within the camp of anti-imperialist sovereignty, not handed over to the NGO–World Bank axis to “audit.”
So what does a revolutionary position look like?
Build Sovereignty, Not Dependency: Strategic Demands for the South
First, we must defend the right of Global South governments to negotiate on their own terms. This includes pushing for:
• Labor quota clauses in bilateral agreements—as part of Ethiopia’s strategy to maximize local participation in Chinese infrastructure projects, according to the Center for Global Development’s call for stronger local content in African BRI contracts.
• Apprenticeship mandates requiring Chinese firms to transfer skills and technology to Indigenous engineers, architects, and trade workers.
• Profit reinvestment guarantees—mechanisms ensuring a portion of revenues stay in-country to fund public infrastructure, not just private coffers.
These are not anti-China demands. These are anti-comprador demands. They are the demands of workers and peasants confronting their own domestic bourgeoisie—and leveraging China’s investment not to entrench dependency, but to build material independence.
Let it be said clearly: the contradictions within BRI are opportunities for class struggle. They are spaces where the Global South can press for more—more wages, more sovereignty, more control. But this struggle must be waged by the people of the South themselves—not outsourced to Western academics who never built a road or fought a loan shark in their lives.
The North’s Role Is Not to Police, But to Disarm the Empire
What, then, is the responsibility of the Western left? It is not to nitpick BRI contracts or wag fingers at Chinese labor hierarchies. It is to break the chokehold of their own imperial state.
• Demand the U.S. and EU cancel the debts they imposed on BRI nations—and fully implement HIPC and MDRI debt relief, which has delivered 100% cancellation of eligible IMF, World Bank, and African Development Bank debts to 36–37 poor countries to date.
• Expose and dismantle Western financial dominance in global bond markets—African governments now owe more to private Western creditors than to China (35% vs. 12% of external debt), and these loans carry significantly higher interest rates.
• Organize class war at home: oppose military spending, shut down arms exports, and sabotage the engines of empire that profit from Global South collapse.
In other words: don’t tell China how to build a dam until you’ve stopped your own government from bombing one. Don’t talk about fair wages in Kenya until you’ve organized workers at Amazon and Raytheon. And don’t cry about Chinese construction sites when your own tax dollars pay for apartheid walls and surveillance drones.
From Solidarity to Strategy: Toward an Anti‑Imperialist Development Front
The real task before us is to forge a global front of sovereign development. One that links:
• Chinese infrastructure capacity
• Latin American resource sovereignty
• African industrial potential
• The revolutionary traditions of peoples who have resisted empire for centuries
This means building **South‑South labour federations** to bargain collectively with Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, and even domestic firms. It means creating political alliances across Global South governments to demand coordinated development, not just bilateral deals. These ideas aren’t theoretical—they reflect the steadily growing decolonial and technical cooperation models underway between the Global South and China:
Examples include China’s BRI-linked support via the AIIB and New Development Bank, designed to fund infrastructure projects **without Western-style conditionality** 1. Similarly, UN and regional bodies now champion South‑South and triangular cooperation—encompassing exchanges in trade, health, education, and technology—building practical capacity across countries, from Latin America to Africa to Asia 2.
Because the NGO model is not the path to liberation. It is the velvet glove of imperialism. A slower suffocation. A prettier poverty.
Endnotes
- Fudan University Green Finance & Development Center. “BRI Investment Report 2023.”
- Oxford University, African Affairs. “Labor Practices on Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway.”
- International Labour Organization (ILO). “Decent Work in Conflict Zones: Iraq Compensation Structures.” 2019.
- SAIS-CARI Working Paper #26. “Chinese Firms and Employment Dynamics in Africa.”
- Xinhua. “China’s BRI Rail Projects Link Africa and Asia.” October 2023.
- IEA. “Africa Energy Outlook 2022.”
- Center for Global Development. “Making Chinese Infrastructure Investments Work in Africa.”
- Center for Global Development. “What Does China’s Development Finance Really Look Like?”
- Vanity Fair. “Prisoners of Halliburton.” April 2007.
- European Parliament. “Raw Materials and Colonialism: The Case of Niger.” 2022.
- World Bank. “International Debt Statistics 2024.”
- IEA. “World Energy Investment 2023.”
- IMF. “Debt Relief Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative.” (2023 factsheet confirming 36 countries have reached completion point)
- Debt Justice UK. “African Governments Owe More to Private Lenders Than China.” (reports 35% vs. 12% debt share and double interest rates)
- UN Office for South-South Cooperation. “What Is South-South and Triangular Cooperation?”
- New Development Bank. “Project Portfolio.”
- Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). “Approved Projects.”
- Novastan. “China in Central Asia: Fact‑checking and Myth‑busting.” Interview with Agnieszka Joniak‑Lüthi and Alessandro Rippa. December 2, 2022.
- Molinari, Andrea, and Ceballos, Rocío. “Analysing the New Development Bank’s Core Objectives (2016–2022).” Africa Policy Research Institute (APRI), November 2024.
