China needs a green Marshall Plan for the Global South

MONEY doesn’t just make returns. It builds alliances, too.

That was the thinking behind the Marshall Plan, the US aid package intended to restart shattered European economies in the aftermath of World War II. “If Europe fails to recover, the peoples of these countries might be driven to the philosophy of despair”, and return to totalitarianism, then United States president Harry Truman told Congress in proposing the programme.

The political effect of turning the continent’s war-ravaged economies into a prosperous, integrated group of US allies is hard to deny. Rich countries need to contemplate that as they raise barriers ever higher against Chinese clean technology. If Beijing is serious about building mutual alliances abroad, it will do everything it can to use its industrial and financial power to emulate Marshall’s example.