As donor-funded infrastructure projects increasingly mobilise private capital, critics argue that it will lead to financial logic overriding important societal objectives, running the risk of financialising development. In Asia's developing countries, where China and Japan compete for infrastructure investment, public finance remains a significant influence on infrastructure projects. This article scrutinises it by investigating Japan's state-led finance for "quality" infrastructure in Asia. Bangladesh's Dhaka Metro is used as a case study to examine how Japan's official infrastructure finance has influenced the Bangladeshi government's developmental initiatives and whether they have resulted in socially desirable outcomes for its citizens. The article argues that Japan's state-led infrastructure finance risks overlooking the politicisation of public infrastructure, if not financialising it. In Bangladesh, Japan's aid regime failed to recognise the relationship between state legitimacy and infrastructure governance by assuming that technology would induce human society to progress towards a better future set in an apolitical universe. Thus, while the Bangladeshi state was recognised as a driver of economic growth, its infrastructure governance was perceived as a technical problem to be fixed by a team of technical experts. In such a depoliticised context, building high-quality infrastructure was considered developmental, regardless of whatever political regime governed it.
China's Belt and Road Initiative is the subject of considerable debate. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the reasons why Chinese state-owned enterprises involved in the initiative so heavily recruit their own country's manual workers to work overseas and why those workers sometimes experience mistreatment. This article seeks to answer these questions through a close analysis of documents collected by an advocacy group in Indonesia, Algeria, Serbia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It details workplace abuses in the sequence that workers encounter them, from their initial recruitment to their confinement within work-site compounds abroad. In addition, the article highlights several factors inherited from China's early reform era that enable abuses and lead Chinese state-owned enterprises to use Chinese workers abroad: militaristic oversight of employees; barracks-style housing for them; surveillance of workers' personal lives and communications; elaborate tiers of sub-contracting; and wage gaps resulting from regional and demographic distinctions between workers. Finally, it examines the characteristics of host countries, especially their political regime types, that render them less likely to enforce their own labour laws on behalf of foreign workers.
