Okay, here's the point at which I'm going to say that some of the views I'm expressing are my own, and the positions are not necessarily the positions of the commission itself.
The Chinese government, the CCP, is really using the belt and road initiative both to create markets for its own products and to increase its influence. They talk about how what they desire, of course, is a community of common human destiny.
Last year, the commission did one hearing on China in Africa, and you could see the impact of Chinese investment in Africa in a lot of different ways. This year, we're going to be doing one next month on China in Latin America.
A tool that they use within BRI is of course the lending that they do. By the way, Montenegro, which got, I think, $1 billion for highway building from China, has just actually told the EU that they need help repaying it. One concern about all the lending they're doing is debt-trap diplomacy, of course. They're using vaccines now, vaccine diplomacy, to try to increase their influence.
The AIIB, I think, was a real effort to try to create a new international institution that would be Chinese-designed and basically Chinese-controlled. They're struggling within the multilateral institutions. They're working hard to influence what's happening in the multilateral institutions, but it was their way to basically start one from scratch.
We should all acknowledge that there are huge infrastructure investment needs in countries around the world. That, I think, is one challenge that all of our countries working together need to address, but some of it is insidious.