https://www.dw.com/en/nepal-what-happened-to-chinas-belt-and-road-projects/a-61941737
The Himalayan nation of Nepal signed agreements of entering into the Belt and Road initiative, China´s international financial development plans, in 2017, yet due to various roadblocks in the last 5 years, still nothing has been finalized. At first there were many plans being floated up until 2019, only lacking clear directives, however it was all stalled by the COVID pandemic in 2020, and upon being revisited in the past year, Nepal sees things very differently. For one, the once pro-China ruling party of 2017 is no longer in power and is replaced by a far more India sub-continent minded conservative party. On top of this, the Nepalese are looking at the situation in Sri Lanka where they have become very beholden to China and fear the same for them, so in March 2022, when the Chinese were looking to create concrete plans, Nepal delayed and wanted more time for review and re-negotiation. I analyze this to be Nepal definitely looking around the world and seeing what is happening to other countries who moved much faster on the Belt and Road, and certainly rethinking things. Examples such as Ecuador, who is now entirely in debt and in a cycle of continual payments for the long future, or Sri Lanka who literally needed to hand over operations and control of an entire port in their country, one which China built, to Beijing. Nepal was clearly waiting for everything to play out and not allowing themselves to be a test run and it seems it may have really paid off. To relate this now to international relations, and while this concept is most commonly linked to the failure that is Marxism, what is occuring with the BRI, and what is being attempted to happen in Nepal is a perfect example of Dependence Theory. Dependence Theory is the idea that a set of core states exploit whatever their set of weaker states on their own periphery is, and that this system is nearly inevitable. I see no other better example than China, a nearly timeless superpower in the world, coinciding with the examples of weaker states being Sri Lanka, Nepal, and countries like Vietnam, as it has been for centuries, jockeying together in a new system in which the infrastructure of these countries and their own economies may be controlled and dominated by China. While the conclusions some thinkers met with Dependence Theory have been objective failures of the 20th century, the base idea is very observable objectively in the arena of international relations.