Prior to signing with my present company in Bermuda, I was interviewing with a Miami-based hedge fund purportedly focused on Asian technology stocks. In a spotless office overlooking Coral Gables, I sat across from the founder – a charismatic Cuban-American Wall Street veteran – as he skimmed through a copy of my resume. I stifled a yawn. Four hours of sleep the night before – a full hour less than my banking analyst average. I’d been scrambling to finish a presentation on IMAX, a stock the fund loved, but I was much more lukewarm on it than all the analysts in the room. IMAX was making half of its total revenue in China, and the general sentiment of “emerging markets” investors in the U.S. was to pour capital into companies trying to replicate an American success story in China. Movies are good, people love movies, household income in China is rising so they’ll go to the movies more. Simple logic – if the whole world worked the way America worked. (Within five months of my rather pessimistic presentation, IMAX stock had fallen to half its original price. Intellectual vindication.)

You’d imagine that a fund throwing a few hundred million U.S. dollars into Asian stocks would know something about Asia. And if we’re talking about technology stocks, I’d hope that Taiwan is on the radar – it is, after all, an epicenter of the global semiconductor industry. That was my assumption walking into the interview that morning, but the illusion wore off quickly.

“You’re from Taiwan, right?” The interview has now moved onto the personality fit stage.

“Yes. I was born there.”

“They speak Cantonese there, right?”

It took a lot of resolve to stop myself from smirking. Not a single analyst at the fund – nor the founder himself – spoke an Asian language. How are you supposed to invest in a region where nobody is able to understand the lingua franca or read the news without translation? How did anyone give them money to begin with?

Ten years ago – or even just five years ago – China was always referred to as an emerging market. China was catching up to the U.S. at impressive speed, and would overtake its economy “in our lifetime”. Now, it’s arguably the one BRIC country that has really lived up to economists’ grand predictions. “Emerging” doesn’t seem to be the right term anymore, but for many in the western world it’s still wild, wild country. On the surface of things, the economy has opened up dramatically and has been heavily influenced by American capitalism. But ask any Chinese person on the Mainland, and there would be hushed agreement that yes, in fact, the government crackdowns on culture and “ethics” have gotten progressively harsher over the past few years. The occasional front-page articles on New York Times about the state of the Communist Party and Xi Jinping’s ambitions seem to generate a lot of tattle every time, but in reality there have been decades of machinations before this, predictably gone unreported.

China is in uncharted waters. History provides us with no blueprint for how a massive, population-dense economy based on communist ideals should or will develop. For the rest of the world, the most dangerous thing to do right now would be to project history lessons learnt from the West onto the Far East. At the core of it, all humans are motivated by the same things – food, water, sex, shelter. But once those boxes are checked, motivations are myriad. Do you champion Rousseau? Or Hobbes? Or Confucius?

China is grossly and dangerously misunderstood. Let’s start off with the basics – the economy. The bedrock of social stability, and the staff of legitimacy to every regime in the history of mankind. Unfortunately, however, even theories of economy are rooted in centuries of cultural bias.

There is a fascinating book on this topic by Michael Pettis, called The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy. Pettis is a noted economist who has done a lot of work on China, notably with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (highly recommend checking out his blog!) In The Great Rebalancing, Pettis discusses the interaction between trade balances and domestic policy, and the play-off between savings, consumption, and investment. The most notable difference between China’s economy and that of the U.S. is the large delta between the two countries’ current account balances – fodder for the ongoing trade “war”. The U.S. has a low savings rate and is a net importer of goods and services; China is the opposite. Infrastructure investment has long been the driver of growth in China, says Pettis, “with investment subsidised by hidden or explicit transfers from the household sector that simultaneously reduce the household share of GDP”. Household income drops, consumption goes up, relative savings go down (especially so in China, where the idea of delayed gratification is very much imbued into social thought.)

Now, China’s large current account surplus is bound to revert to “the mean” at some point, or at least in theory. The big question now is when and how exactly this could happen. A trade war will have minimal net impact on both the U.S. and China; as long as foreign countries export excess savings to the U.S., driving up its capital account surplus, the current account deficit will never reverse. U.S. companies are already sitting on a pile of cash at historically low interest rates, so the foreign capital inflows will not be driving up investment – they will only drive down savings. And voilà, everything remains pretty much as it is.

And how do foreign countries export excess savings? China is seeing a significant increase in domestic consumption already with the rise of the middle class, but on the State level the Xi dynasty seems to be hell-bent on the trail of public investment. It makes sense: restructure the domestic economy for posterity’s sake, while continuing to bolster the (fudged?) sky-high GDP growth numbers. With internal mass migration from rural villages to cities, infrastructure construction has already seen its boom domestically. The next frontier to conquer seems to be the world.

On a recent trip to East Africa, I was surprised by just how far this Chinese influence extended. Along the dusty roads of Addis Ababa, Chinese billboards and signs vastly outnumber English ones. Chinese construction firms jostle for projects, from downtown apartment blocks to cross-continental roads cutting through bone-dry desert in Ethiopia. This boom in infrastructure investment is a direct result of China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) policy, a much-discussed economic development strategy adopted by the government in 2013. Popular estimates for total spending on the project range from $1 trillion to $8 trillion, and the geographic footprint seems to be constantly expanding. When it was initially announced in 2013, the two major components were an overland “belt” across the Eurasian supercontinent and a maritime “road” across the Indian Ocean up to Europe via the Suez Canal. Since the announcement, OBOR projects have expanded into continental Africa and just about every other resource-rich corner of the globe – even cyberspace and satellite-navigation services are in play. OBOR is now as much an exercise in foreign policy as it is an economic project.

Prior to landing in Addis, reports on OBOR in the western media I was able to find were almost exclusively critical of the scheme. The Chinese have been slowly relocating labour-intensive industries to the continent for years, and offering loans – questionably non-performing – to fund the construction of critical infrastructure. Problems arise when these construction projects turn out to be non-productive investments – the over-construction of new buildings or roads that bring in no future revenue would only rack up debt that African states are finding increasingly hard to service. The result is an entire continent indebted to one country – and an out-sized influence of China on African domestic policy.

Detractors point to China’s record in Sri Lanka, where the Hambantonta Port was signed over to the Chinese on a 99-year lease in the face of a mounting debt burden. China effectively gained a strategic naval outpost in the Indian Ocean, converting economic loss into geopolitical gain. Chinese loans in developing economies are often securitized by strategic assets and commodities, and opaque terms of lending mean that it is practically impossible to stack up interest rates and repayment periods next to western standards. So there we go: potential loss of sovereignty for cheap loans? Trust capitalism to deliver new bridges and apartment blocks – or live off the charity of well-meaning foreigners?

In 2016 alone, roughly $50 billion of aid dollars poured into Africa, with the bulk coming from American and European organisations. Only 10% went towards humanitarian aid (or, short-term emergency aid following conflicts and natural disasters). The rest has contributed towards a whole gamut of longer-term development projects ranging from education to small business – with little measurable result. More often than not, a not insignificant portion of these dollars go towards the nebulous “Operations” of field personnel.

Last month in Addis, I stayed with an acquaintance who headed the E.U.’s regional aid efforts. I found myself in a beautiful gated compound on the outskirts of town - high walls shielded the idyllic garden from the craziness of the overgrown city, and the gate was manned 24/7 by the assigned guard. Any time I ventured out, I was assigned a car and driver that waited dutifully outside of any restaurant or shop I went into. My host for this stopover had been working in humanitarian aid for almost a decade, and we spent the evenings going through his top-shelf liquor brought in from Dubai.

“Man, it’s been a wild ride,” he says, extinguishing his cigarette and pulling a fresh one of the pack. “I can still remember those days stationed in Kabul. We were saving lives there. Huddled up in bunkers, listening to the bombs fly by overhead. Thankfully we had some pretty good champagne. And caviar that came in on the Brussels plane. It was wild.”

I’m not quite sure where the caviar fit into his aid budget, but sadly this cognitive dissonance wasn’t unique.

A week later in Hargeisa, I met up for dinner with a friend and his co-workers at an NGO consulting firm. I had been staying at a hostel downtown, so I was picked up by the company’s armoured van to get to the restaurant. After I jumped on board, one of the upbeat young college grads remarked that this was his first time ever downtown.

“You’ve been here how long?” I asked incredulously.

“Six months. But you never need to come here, you know, you’ve got everything you need up near the airport.”

About fifteen minutes away from downtown – triple that if rain washes out the main road – Hargeisa’s airport district feels a world apart. Up on a hill overlooking the city, this “expat oasis” is home to most of the city’s humanitarian aid offices and diplomat residences. All the buildings are freshly painted, with high walls and gates fencing in backyards interlaced with the latest security systems. On the crest of the hill stands the Ambassador Hotel, the storied stomping ground of foreign dignitaries and aid workers on months-long assignments. (“Only good if you don’t look Somali,” chimed in our handler on the van, “they don’t let us use the gym.”)

Any NGO posting in Somaliland came with your own security detail, driver, and handler. Land prices on Expat Hill have been skyrocketing for the past few years, as the relative political stability of the region began to attract investors from overseas and across the diaspora. Somaliland is a self-declared republic recognized by zero members of the United Nations, a break-off nation from Somalia’s 1991 civil war – but the sense of different-ness is palpable here. It has its own functioning government, military, and border control. The blue and white flag of Somalia is nowhere to be seen – replaced everywhere by the tricolor Somaliland flag with a black star at its centre. In the crudest terms, this is “garden variety” Somalia – functioning, safe, and a sensible alternative to setting up operations in Mogadishu. I couldn’t help wondering, though, how any aid happens when all the foreigners here are ensconced on Expat Hill. How do you profess to help when you never venture into the heart of the city? Where do you even begin without talking to the people who’ve been living here their entire lives?

On my flight out of Somaliland, I sat next to a businessman from Malawi who had been working in Hargeisa for the past three years. Over the next hour, I was regaled with stories of his childhood on the lake, his education in the U.K., and his own take on U.S.-China relations unfolding in his own backyard.

“You tell me,” I say, handing my sandwich wrapper to the air stewardess passing along the aisle. “I’m actually very interested in this. In the States, everything we hear about China’s involvement in Africa has been pretty negative – how China has been exploiting Africa’s labour and resources, isn’t really interested in development, et cetera…”

“Have you thought about why they say that?”

“I’m not sure what you mean– “

“Media is all propaganda. The western world has been in Africa for centuries and now someone else is coming into their territory.”

“Territory? Isn’t the U.N. doing a lot of stuff here?”

“Ah. The U.S., the E.U., the U.N.… all the same. They’ve been providing aid for years now. But where are the results? Nothing much has changed. You know, I knew someone from the EU working in Addis. They were building houses in the rural areas, but only a few. Very nice houses, you know. Because the house should be a habitat they say, not just shelter. They bring in interior designers all the way from America to make the houses look nice.”

“Interior designers?”

“Yes. That’s where all the money went. After whatever government in power took away half of it first.”

Government, in more cases than not, governed under a kleptomaniac dictatorship propped up by the same dollars that fill the aid coffers.

“But the Chinese – how can I speak poorly of the Chinese? I look around me, and they were the ones who built the apartments, the shops, the hospitals. Much more hard-working than the Africans, to be honest. They provide jobs so the young people are learning new skills. Even if the Chinese leave in a few years, we know how to build a bridge. Working for white people, working for the Chinese, or some African millionaire – what’s the difference for the people actually working? You can give a fish, or you can teach fishing – isn’t that a proverb in America?”

Under a 120F sun of a blazing Ethiopian July, I watched as Chinese labourers worked alongside local men on the newest highway project cutting through Tigray desert. Emerging out of the horizon of this dusty wasteland, neat rows of worker dormitories populate the Chinese construction compound. The buildings resemble shipping containers rather than anything with permanent intent, but every few feet an air-conditioning unit protruded out, whirring fiercely away. This is nowhere close to the glamorous or at least comfortable lifestyle associated with expatriation. No pubs, no household help, and certainly no romantic fantasies from Out of Africa.

In another village on our way to Mek’ele, our convoy of Jeeps stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. This was just the first day of our 3-day Danakil trek, but the Chinese found each other quickly – I was squeezed into the corner of a rickety plastic table, along with a ragtag group of expats recently sent out from China to “investigate”. (“Investigation”, by the way, was the de facto African assignment. Middle managers are shipped out here by their companies in Shanghai or Beijing to “investigate” the landscape – basically, to dig up any and every money-making possibility.) These guys around the table had been in Addis for the past few months, and decided to take an impromptu trip around the country on their first weekend off. As we tucked into goat stew – supplemented with B.Y.O. Chinese supermarket peanuts from my neighbour – a lanky young man walked up to our table. He was Ethiopian – clearly a local in his well-worn jelly sandals prevalent in the Tigray region.

“Ni hao. Ni men shi zhong guo ren ma?”

Jesus. Accent-free, fluent Mandarin. In the middle of the Ethiopian desert.

“Wo xiang gei ni jie shao ge xin peng you. Chen xian sheng. Zuo zai na’er. Qu nian ban lai de.”

My companions nodded. Yes, we were Chinese. Yes, let’s meet this other Chinese guy he wanted to introduce us to. With bowls of rice – and B.Y.O. bamboo chopsticks in hand – we followed the young man to the back of the restaurant. An old Chinese man was hunkered over lunch, speaking in Mandarin with the Ethiopian men at the same table. He must have been over seventy – oddly zen and sweat-free in an off-white tank, methodically peeling off strips of goat meat off the bone. How was anyone not covered in sweat in this heat?

Chen was sent out here a year ago to monitor the stretch of road construction out of Mek’ele, but the team has moved gradually northwards. He was from Changsha, and greatly appreciated the bag of dry-roasted peanuts that my new friend left behind out of Chinese solidarity. (“I’m sorry I didn’t get the right brand with those Sichuan peppercorns – this is my last stash from Beijing.”) He was sent out by his company, much to his dismay, as he contemplated retirement and a move back to his birth village. But the son was all set up and married in Beijing, the wife has long been buried, so there wasn’t much else to lose was there? Twelve months later, he found himself moving two faded duffle bags into a flimsy wooden hut where hot sand sifts through the wooden wall beams every time the wind picked up. The closest town was about two hours away, if no boulders have crashed onto the one road that led to all civilization. Chen thought his poor rural village was a shithole – “Now,” he says, “I know why everyone wants to donate money to Africa.”

To be clear, not everyone sent out from China agrees with the grand vision of OBOR, or even sees the value of any “investigation” postings overseas. But one thing is certain: the Chinese proverb of chi ku nai lao is very much alive. “Endure and persevere” would probably be the most natural translation – the ability to grit your teeth and work hard through pain and suffering is a much-valued asset inculcated into the Chinese upbringing. This is the unseen human face of OBOR: an army of capable, hard-working expatriates who – however jaded with the system – manage to carve out a community in the backroads of Africa that sees itself as equal and never superior to the local society already established there. Many of these expatriates have only recently broken out of abject poverty themselves – they might not know any English, but are very comfortable living without security details, drivers, and flushing toilets. In return, they’ve become part of the social fabric in whichever city they move into - and continue to spread Chinese influence in the furthest corners of the globe.

China’s soft power – a concept categorically overlooked in the discussion of US-China relations – has already been creeping up over the past decades. High-achieving students from developing countries have been turning to China for generous State-funded scholarships, especially attractive when China’s influence as a OBOR partner pretty much guarantees a State-sponsored job upon graduation. In numbers: in 2016, China hosted more than 60,000 African students, which represents a 44-fold increase over the year 2000. With growing soft power, it is able to court the best and the brightest from some of the fastest-growing regions in the world. In contrast, almost half of the one million international students at US post-secondary institutions in the 2016-2017 education year came from just two countries, China and India. South Korea and Saudi Arabia round up the top four feeder countries, but beyond, no other country represents more than 3% of the total number.

These statistics should be alarming. Education sows the seeds for the next generation of thought leadership. The University of Chicago, for example, has propagated its own school of thought for decades through entire classes of international students who return to their home countries and shape domestic economic policies. Without going so far as to condemn Chinese universities as an intellectual straitjacket – another oft-repeated sentiment in western media – it should nevertheless be clear that Chinese higher education is a platform for the State agenda. Unfortunately for America, when guaranteed financial stability is part of the package, free speech gets bumped down the agenda for many of China’s scholarship recipients.

Do I think that China has the best interests of the African continent at heart? No, not at all. But whatever trade or economic bad blood African states have with China rests largely on that government-to-government level. The free market forces at work behind the building up of Africa are also nudging it ever closer to China. A child growing up in the outskirts of Freetown is much more familiar with Chinese faces than with European ones, and Mandarin has become the de facto second language in many parts of Africa, supplanting English.

For most people in the West, it is inconceivable how entrenched the Chinese are in every single country touched by OBOR – from Kyrgyzstan to Sierra Leone. “How worried should the West be about China?” asks the BBC. “China has risen, and may be on collision with the U.S.,” reports Bloomberg. For the Chinese, however, this has all been in the plans - a meticulous blueprint for bringing the world’s most populous country into the 21st Century, and eclipsing an American empire seen to be overly complacent for far too long. When we call China’s foreign policy a “second colonisation,” however, we are really facing a moral dilemma. As much as a traveler wishes everything remain folksy and “authentic” in the villages he trespasses, who is he to decide what is best for the villagers? We can scoff at the intrusion of a McDonald’s in a picturesque medieval town – and harp on about the dangers of fast food and capitalism – but are we only reinforcing the quaint romantic image in our heads of how the world should develop?

Such is the problem the West faces in regard to China’s role in the new world order. Articles warning of the Chinese debt trap hold no weight at the busy ports of Djibouti or Mombasa, where capital inflows are welcomed and Chinese merchants, expats and families integrate seamlessly into the daily pace of life. Locals no longer blink an eye when a Chinese person boards the crowded city shuttles, and Chinese restaurants advertising spicy hotpot or noodle soups have become a popular gathering place for local dignitaries. There is little physical separation between the Chinese community and the rest of city – by throwing themselves into their new lives, the same expats who found themselves thousands of miles away from home have also unwittingly become the best emissaries of Chinese soft power in their new countries.

Unfortunately for the West, in today’s day and age, that soft power may prove even more lasting than any hard asset Xi Jinping could seize.