Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They’ve been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren’t Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it’s bots or wumao. Human beings can’t possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
From that news.com australian article I posted: “But the concept of a Chinese “debt trap” has also been criticised, with a study in 2020 finding China had restructured or refinanced about $21 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. The study also noted there was no evidence of “asset seizures”and that Chinese lenders had not used courts to enforce payments, or applied penalty interest rates to distressed borrowers. [emphasis mine]”
They’ve had the opportunity to really milk these countries if they wanted, and actively chosen not to.
EDIT: Here’s the study being referenced in that paragraph i quoted: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3745021