China has also built government, buildings, hospitals, roads/hwy's, residential developments...etc But China is doing this to suit their own self interest.
Our countries may not have gotten much in return, but our companies do. For example Nigeria's oil fields. Environmentally is a huge disaster, caused by our own Big Oil Companies. The people of that region and the greater good of the country has not been served...on the contrary, it has been been "raped and pillaged by Western Big Oil." Big Oil has made out like a bandit!
I am not so naive to be sympathetic to the Chinese, but I'm also not so naive as to think that we are wearing the white hats here. The colonial countries and more recently the West and now China & Russia have done great damage as Bill has pointed out. So when we say "lets stop helping" as its a waste of money, we are not considering the longer term financial and other implications of this decision.
Back to the original point, those are statistics that were put out there as a lightning rod. They are numbers that are not flushed out and don't explain why its not working. The one trend I see in politics today, is that people believe these issues are very simple to resolve...they are anything but and would have been resolved a lot time ago if they were. Just like grass roots political parties, they promise a simpler, truer government, but they can never achieve it because no mater the stripes, these people walk into the same straitjacket that funnels them right down the same road. So the only real changes that can take place are small and the bigger issues can only be nudged towards a specific direction. That's politics and diplomacy.
