I recollect, here, what I had written on OBOR which is equally applicable to CPEC: and all of China’s programs:

One Belt One Road. (OBOR) is the revival of a Historical trade route that was carved by daring entrepreneurs for profit into a latter day concept that positions the Middle Kingdom at the center of the emerging World.

Legitimate? Perhaps. If it were not for China’s territorial ambitions that are explicit and based on a peculiar notion of History derived from a time where there were no real borders and large tracts of Chinese History knew little outside China and considered China to be the World. Witness Tibet, Leh, Ladakh, Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and so on.

Harmless? Perhaps. But China has never made a secret of its intentions to take revenge for past “humiliations”. Witness Japan and India (as a British proxy during the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion and so on).

This is serious demand. Desire backed by adequate military power.

The US, as China rightly reflects, was driven largely by the impulse to derive profits to the benefit of a small minority of its ruling class. China is driven by the desire to benefit its ruling “proletariat”, But, while the US has surplus of land that it can easily share with, for example, the Moslems that it has displaced in the Middle East with its War Crimes, China has territorial ambitions. While the US has turned every defeat into victory by using Hollywood effectively to erase all humiliation, China nurses grudges.

OBOR is not just about trade. It is about Empire. It is the opposite, if such is conceivable, of the good Admiral Zheng He of yore: