All I will say is that I am no lover of China. Chinese civilization, like Western civilization has exhibited anti-black tendencies and attitudes. The Chinese are great lovers of African markets, but not African people.

I do encourage you though to try to understand the African perspective on this issue, as well as other related issues that you may not generally understand before you try to characterize it as propaganda. Modern Africa is in a state of flux and deeply in need of infrastructure. There are many who say there are heavy costs to Chinese built infrastructure in Africa, Those same analysts will not reflect on the severe costs currently to Africa of its lack of infrastructures. The absence of intra-regional rail, highways, of connected electricity grids, of pipes and pipelines. If the West is truly concerned about African welfare, they can always step to the fore with their own expansive infrastructure agenda, but they largely won't, and we all know the reason why.

No one is resisting discussion of abuse. We work against the abuse of Hacker News every day. When people raise concerns we look into it every time. The problem here is that you're inventing it out of whole cloth. What is the evidence? Some "pro-China comments" that "sound reasonable"? Someone expressing views you don't like is not evidence. People here have a wide range of backgrounds and therefore views.

In one sentence you project astroturfers out of purest imagination, and in the next are already talking about them as if they've been substantiated. That's the cheapest of internet cheap shots, it's poison to the community, and you can't post like this here.

General remark:

In the last few months this class of posts has migrated from "You're a Russian spy" and "how much did Putin pay you to post that" to "You're a Chinese shill". It's obviously the same phenomenon, and the fact that it swings so dramatically with political fashion already shows that this phenomenon is not factual, but mass-psychological.

There's an internet law that the probability of users accusing someone of astroturfing rises with the intensity with which they disagree with their view. I hope someone comes up with a pithy formulation and snappy name for it. Anyone?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18762617 and marked it off-topic.

It may be completely off due to sampling bias, but I don't think there is any source out there with better confidence, as I have never seen anybody doing a serious poll of the subject.

EDIT: Well, in reply to your edit, how did you search for that research? All I can see is trash news about some huge investment coming from China to Brazil in the future or how the next Brazilian president is a xenophobe that will reject money from anywhere. I still haven't seen any serious handle of the subject, by researchers or the press.

When you buy a road, you get to transport things; when you buy a port, you get to do long distance trade. That happens even when no local job is created.

The benefit is there as long as the loans are for fairly priced infrastructure with real value. People (across the world) suspect this kind of loan because it is too often used for financing way too expensive infrastructure with no real value. The local population of a country has the challenge of allowing their politicians to do the first without allowing them to do the second, so if you trust your people and institutions to achieve that, there's absolutely no problem with the loans.

Here in Brazil people are starting to open up for the Chinese loans. It is happening at the same time as people are trusting a bit more the government to not be corrupt, but I don't think there is any causal relation.

What has changed the equation for the continent started in the 2000s, the commodities boom along with telecommunications improvement, along with the entrant of new players such as China, India, Turkey, and until recently Brazil(in the Lusophone states).

So if we choose to look at those historical datapoints, without even getting into abuses at the IMF/World bank, we can effectively agree that the Bretton Woods sisters have done very little to move the needle on African prosperity.

Can anyone blame Africans for ignoring the World Bank and IMF when the countries that did ignore its orthodoxy, from China in the late 1970s to then India in the early 1990s, prospered?