Biden proposes rival plan to 'Belt and Road'
WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden has called for a "democratic" plan to launch a multi-billion-dollar China Belt and Road infrastructure campaign as tensions between Asia and the West erupt.
Biden said by the end of Friday that he had placed the proposal on his phone with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson amid controversy over the sanctions imposed on a handful of Uighurs in Xinjiang province in northwestern China.
"I recommend that we ought to, indeed, have a comparative program from majority rule territories, helping those networks all over the planet, which, indeed, need assistance," Biden told journalists, alluding to Belt and Road.
The impact of Beijing has grown in some countries in recent years with loans and projects under the program, raising concerns between regional governments and Western nations.
China has helped many of its countries or developed roads, trains, dams and ports.
President Xi Jingping has promised to "operate more open, green and clean" under Belt and Road, but Chinese banks have continued to fund coal projects as Beijing uses the program to make charcoal overseas.
Somewhere in the range of 2000 and 2018, $ 23.1 percent of $ 251 billion was contributed by two significant Chinese approach banks on abroad energy projects utilized in coal projects, as indicated by a Boston University site about energy financing in China.
London, during a televised interview between Biden and Johnson, did not mention the US president's proposal to respond to Western Belt and Road, but noted that the two leaders had discussed "significant steps" to impose "human rights violations" in Xinjiang.
The European Union, Britain, Canada and the United States punished several members of Xinjiang's political and economic leaders this week in a joint action against alleged rights, resulting in retaliation from Beijing for punishing people from the EU and the UK.
Beijing, emphasizing that the Xinjiang state is "an internal affair," announced sanctions on Friday against nine British nationals and four organizations, saying they had "spread deceptions and obscure subtleties" about the Uighurs' organization.
At least a million Uighurs and members of several Muslim groups are being held in the Xinjiang camps, according to human rights groups, who accuse the authorities of forcing them to work and forcing them to work.
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