"New book speaks to the winners and losers of the Belt and Road Initiative", 26 November 2020

“The residents of these villages have had their lives changed forever, some for the better, and others, for the worse,” writes Wade Dessart in the epilogue to Belt and Road Through My Village, recently published by a coalition of Asian NGOs.
Through interviews of people living in the immediate vicinity of seven projects in five key Belt and Road countries, the book shows that infrastructure projects have multifaceted impacts at the local level, representing development for some but not for others.

Such impacts are too often disregarded and under-represented in policy discussions of the Belt and Road, or in the Chinese media, which tends to portray a “harmonious” image. The more than a hundred interviews reveal impacts ranging from environmental pollution and rapidly changed ways of life and livelihoods, to less material but clearly pressing psychological and emotional impacts – fear and confusion crop up in a number of the accounts. [...]

Belt and Road Through My Village provides a starting point for this difficult but necessary process. A number of the stories can be read on the book’s dedicated website.