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Nine years ago, the Rohingya crossed into Bangladesh expecting to stay for a season. They are still there. The speeches have changed hands three times, but the camps have not moved.
This dependence cuts both ways. If the Saudi market were to close for any reason, the impact on Bangladesh's employment would be significant, particularly since other major markets such as Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, and Malaysia have not reopened at scale.
There is the India-shaped hole in the map. By excluding New Delhi, Beijing has made the corridor more diplomatically tractable, but it has also converted an economic connectivity project into a more explicit piece of the China-India strategic contest in the Bay of Bengal.
This history matters for one simple reason -- the corridor China proposed in Beijing in June to the Bangladeshi Prime Minister is the same idea, with the same starting point in Kunming, with the same logic, but without India.
What started as a protest became politics. What was once dismissed as extreme is now the subject of international summits. The questions Green activists were asking 50 years ago -- how do we live within the limits of this planet, and who pays when we do not -- are still the most important questions today.
This is not a government choosing China over India, or East Asia over the West. Rather, Dhaka is trying to keep every door open for as long as the money keeps coming in and as long as no single lender or ally claims it exclusively.