On the chessboard of today’s geopolitics, time is a currency as valuable as the dollar or the yuan. While Western democracies arrive at the negotiating table weighed down with briefcases full of compliance manuals, ten-year environmental impact studies, and human rights clauses that read like sermons, China shows up with a pen and a check. It is the “China pace”: a frenetic speed explained not by superior logistics, but by a political will to bypass the filters that usually protect nations from their own mistakes.
Where institutional controls are weak, Beijing’s speed acts like a seductive siren song that allows elites to sidestep technical oversight in favor of immediate political gain. China understands the electoral cycle perfectly: a politician needs to inaugurate something big before the next election. Beijing offers exactly that—the ability to move from blueprint to reality in record time, without asking uncomfortable questions about procurement transparency or long-term viability. Yet this speed has a strategic design: in countries where the judiciary is weak and oversight is nonexistent, it is far easier to co-opt elites than to persuade a society. Negotiation ceases to be an agreement between states and becomes a pact between individuals, where the leader’s short-term benefit is paid for with the nation’s future assets.
Examples of this “fast track” to disaster now sound like warnings across the Global South. In Ecuador, the Coca Codo Sinclair dam was sold as the energy miracle the country needed. It was negotiated and built with astonishing speed under the government of Rafael Correa. The result? Today the infrastructure shows thousands of cracks, operates at half capacity, and sits under the shadow of regressive erosion that threatens to destroy it entirely. What was once a “fast management” success became an endless debt tied to a crumbling project.
Something similar occurred in Sri Lanka, where the Hambantota port became the flagship project of a political elite seeking grandiose developments in its home region. The absence of a serious market study and the speed of Chinese credit made it possible to build a port that no one used. When the country could not repay the debt, China’s “ease” revealed its other face: Sri Lanka had to hand over sovereignty of the port to a Chinese state-owned company for 99 years in exchange for debt relief. Even in smaller projects, haste often serves as a veil for corruption. In Bolivia, the case of the company CAMC exposed how direct-award contracts—the preferred mechanism for speed—ended up tied to inner circles of power, leaving behind questionable works and half-finished judicial processes.
However, this story is not an inevitable fate. Countries such as Malaysia have shown that it is possible to wake up before the cement dries. Following a change in government, Kuala Lumpur halted multibillion-dollar railway projects already signed with Beijing, arguing that costs had been inflated to conceal corruption schemes linked to the previous elite. By demanding transparency and renegotiating from a position of institutional strength, they managed to save billions and regain sovereignty over their own infrastructure.
The lesson for our region is clear: the speed of Chinese contracts is not a gift—it is a stress test for our democracies. If an agreement is too fast to be audited, it is likely because it is not designed to benefit the country, but to shield those who hold power at that moment. In the end, what is saved in negotiation time is paid for with natural resources sold at bargain prices and with projects that expire long before the debt is fully repaid.
The next time a government announces a megaproject signed “in record time,” we should not celebrate efficiency, but begin to look for where the trap lies; because in the diplomacy of the quick checkbook, those who fail to read the fine print end up surrendering the future. The real danger lies not in China’s ambition, but in the fragility of our own checks and balances.
Ultimately, China’s speed does not build bridges to development, but rather direct passageways to state capture, where the next generation always pays the cost of opacity.
Autor
Director of the Bachelor's Degree in Political Science at the University of CEMA, Argentina. PhD in Political Science from the University of Cádiz, UCA. Postdoctoral studies in Latin American politics, IBEI Barcelona Institute of International Studies.
