Big rig ice road driver Mike McCann travels to Nepal to scatter his late brother’s ashes on Mt. Everest. While on a packed tour bus traversing the deadly 12,000 ft. terrain of the infamous Road to the Sky, McCann and his mountain guide encounter a group of mercenaries and must fight to save themselves, the busload of innocent travelers, and the local villagers’ homeland.
After this, the movie moves on to glorify the Belt and Road Initiative, which is not all pink and roses. It is a way for China to control many smaller countries. Take, for example, Montenegro—a country with a population of over 500,000 and a GDP of $6 billion. China built a billion-dollar road there, and the corrupt government agreed to it. The money to build the road was borrowed from China.
So essentially, you take a loan from China to pay China. Not only that, but you might think your people would participate in the construction, that jobs would be created, and so on. No—only Chinese workers, by a supermajority, are allowed to work on Chinese projects, even though they are on your land. This loan increased Montenegro’s debt-to-GDP ratio to over 80%, and 50% of that debt is owed to China from previous projects.
In other countries, China extracts natural resources and ships them back home. What’s the problem with this? The problem is that your people don’t get more jobs, as most of the workers on these plantations are Chinese. The bribed politicians who allow this give Chinese companies subsidies, which reduce the profits the host nation receives.
The natural resources sent back to China are then used to manufacture expensive products—products that are sold back in your own market. Will this happen to other small nations? No—this is just the beginning. And if you’re a socialist, don’t let your ideology blind you. This is capitalism and exploitation in its purest form.
This comment contains a spoiler.
The movie is good, but it contains some propaganda. The propaganda begins with the mention of the notorious Iraq invasion (which was a genocide that killed a million people so the Americans could steal the oil).