Trevor Noah’s latest pod discusses China. Apparently infrastructure for others is their new influence/weapon.
Trump killed our global soft power and China is stepping into that space.
China has been indebting a lot of Africa building stuff all over the place longer than Trump has been around, doesn’t get talked about very much. I only knew because I watch a few full time travel vloggers.
Yeah China has been funding massive infrastructure expansion around the world for over a decade. All across Africa and Asia.
Because stable infrastructure means a stable economy and more people to buy Chinese stuff. Nothing stopping USA from doing this, as if they want Africa to succeed.
Well, the west has been indebting them without infrastructure build up, so…
So…
So!
Oh I thought you were gonna tankie like “therefore china good!”
China another state like many others but not as bad as Americans think
Number of countries attacked by China is pretty low compared to US.
I agree.
Also when you travel in central or south America you see more and more infrastructure by the Chinese. Still a lot less than Africa, but China is taking investments into ressource rich countries seriously.
They have quite a lot of space to step in as Russia also did kill their soft power.
Everything seems to benefit China.
I mean you have a fascist greedy oligarchy on one side and a wannabe fascist greedy oligarchy on the other; it’s not like China is facing a lot of competition in the realm of great power statesmanship.
I will defo check it out today, cheers!
And on a similar note, here is an article from a couple of months back:
US-China head-to-head: Explained in 11 maps and charts
Before President Trump’s visit to Beijing, Al Jazeera compares the US and China on economics, military and resources.
They beat the US in healthcare; if they beat them in power infrastructure too it would be hilarious
Thank you China.
It really sucks that the Canadian government isn’t also helping Cuba. I am very disappointed in our governments extremely inadequate response to the US’s illegal shakedown of Cuba.
China the 🐐
Cuban Solar Crisis
Why not before? Optics…
Because before Cuban doctors didn’t have to rush to manually pump the respirators for intubated infants multiple times a week during blackouts due to the US blockade intensifying.
Your user tag is “Wumao” so I’m gonna trust my gut.
I’m literally American lol. But I was in China a couple months ago, so I understand why you wouldn’t want to listen to anyone with direct knowledge of the subject, we wouldn’t want to challenge pre-existing beliefs with evidence and observation.
If Russia can pay Americans to spout propaganda benefitting Russia, why can’t China do the same? I’m not saying you are, but “I’m literally American” isn’t a useful response by any means.
Except you could also be someone’s influence campaign. If you automatically give the assumption of “paid propagandist” more weight than the assumption of earnest belief, you may as well exit the Internet.
I’m specifically saying “I’m an American” isn’t a useful rebuttal about being a paid propagandist, nothing more or less. I didn’t say if it was my belief that he was.
Yes, optics, because if the US sinks ships carrying solar panels they lose even more respect on the international stage and bring even more attention to their illegal military blockade of Cuba in which they have directly killed over 200 civilians via bombing vessels in and around Cuba, and indirectly killed at least a few thousand by eliminating oil imports to the country.
China had nothing but risk before the carrier group was moved into place, as the US’ official stance was international sanctions and complete lockout from using USD internationally if you dared to trade with Cuba.
After the blockade those sanctions are meaningless as no other country would follow the US if they actually issue said sanctions, and the US itself isn’t economically capable of handling sanctions against China at this point in time. So China has no risk to help out.
So China has no risk to help out
If China saw it that way, they would be sending oil. They’re still trying not to rock the boat, the way I had it explained by a chinese cab driver is that if they continue to follow the rules and be reliable, more of the world will be willing to expand relations with China, protecting them from the US or anybody else acting unfairly. I did not call him naive to his face.
Why do you think aiding an addiction would be helping out? Solar panels are blockade proof. Cuba’s biggest problems come from over reliance on disposable imports; if Cuba had access to solar Venezuela wouldn’t have been invaded and Cuba wouldn’t have any real negative effects from this blockade besides the loss of tourism income.
Besides China doesn’t sell oil, they do sell Solar panels and batteries. One generally gives what they have.
Keeping the power plants running so babies don’t die is not feeding an addiction wtf.
China has tankers with oil, this is an emergency, building solar is great long term, but it doesn’t matter to the patients on ventilators and the farmers who’s tractors have no fuel.
Keeping the power plants running so babies don’t die is not feeding an addiction wtf.
What… what do you think the solar panels are going to do?
They will decrease the severity of the crisis, but as the article says, theres not enough, they take time to come online, and upgrading Cuba’s grid and storage will take even longer, and it still doesn’t help processes that need oil like farming and concrete production.
Cuba needs oil now.
doesn’t help processes that need oil like farming and concrete production.
If they can reduce oil use in power generation, it should help by reducing the overall amounts of oil they need to procure
Cuba has a huge capacity to make ethanol. Brazil does this.
Brazil is around 8,514,877 km², Cuba is around 110,860 km².
Brazil has around 963,000 km² farm land. Cuba has around 36,000 km²[1] of farmland.
If it were to convert all of its farmland into ethanol production, resulting in the mass starvation of the Cuban population, it could not produce anything close to what Brazil could produce. But how much could it produce?
We’ll be assuming Brazil’s sugarcane method is the most efficient crop for Cuba given their similar climates and growing zones. Which gives us around 764,000 liters of ethanol per km²
Cuba uses 178,000 barrels per day of oil, which comes out to 28,302,000 liters of oil per day, or around 10,337,305,500 liters per year. Which means Cuba only needs to convert… 13,560 km² of their farmland to ethanol production. So the famously fat and never food insecure Cubans need to just give up half[1] of their food production!
Great solution.
[1]
Cuba has 109,000 km² of land, and many sources give the available farmland of cuba at 30% of available land… but also list it at 65.000 km². Which wouldn’t be 30%. I’m assuming 30% is about right given the geography of Cuba. It’s possible 63% of Cuba is farmland, which makes this slightly easier, but looking at google maps that doesn’t seem right.
If China saw it that way, they would be sending oil.
Short term solution from a country without oil.
I did not call him naive to his face.
How dare China behave like the USA.
The naive part was expecting China to be treated fairly by America or its vassals, any progress will be undone via propaganda. Look at this very thread, how many comments are seeing China fighting climate change, protecting Cuba’s sovereignty, and stopping a literal famine, and trying to explain why actually “China bad”.
Nice alt account
Girl my account is older than yours
I think she thinks we’re the same person.
Literally every good thing countries do that they don’t have to is either completely or partially optics.
It’s not like I’m great at reading Spanish, but from what I gather this Prensa Latina article says that three projects of 4 MW each are being built, donated by “the asian giant”, which I assume means China. Whereas 75 is (or rather, was, in 2024) the number of solar parks in total that exists:
Did a translation error sneak in somewhere?
What I don’t get is why that number apparently went down since. This daily report only mentions 54 solar parks:
Los 54 parques solares fotovoltaicos generaron ayer 4240 MW/hora, con una potencia máxima de 792 MW.
Funny side note, even the writer of this note is confused by W vs Wh. They must mean 4240 MWh, MW/h is meaningless.
So looks like the article posted by OP, written in 2026, somehow takes his headline from a translation mistake from the Prensa Latina Article from 2024, and then cites a Granma Article from 2025 for most of its content.
Why not use the 92 parks in the newest plan for the headline? Is this just automated bad blogspam or what is happening?
Edit, nvm wtf
deleted by creator
Great! They’ll be able to keep their empty fridges cool!
