Over hills and valleys too: China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Caribbean

Chapter 7 focuses on the Caribbean, specifically on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Taking these two states as cases, it shows how the BRI’s financial muscle and infrastructural building capacity have transformed the Caribbean developmental landscape. Key to this transformation has been China’s capacity to launch new projects in heavily indebted or cash-strapped economies. It has resulted in some of the region’s traditional ‘partners’, such as the IMF or the European Union, losing their undisputed capacity for influence and coercion. However, Sino-Caribbean relations have also helped entrench long-established structural and postcolonial impediments for development. The chapter argues the BRI represents another iteration of neoliberal business-centric development in the region and so does not produce qualitative socio-economic change.