It has been almost eight years yet enormous issues remain around the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing knows them all but, with face saving widely recognized as the imperative of its foreign policy, prefers not to disclose them publicly. In fact, the BRI is not and never has been a strategy, but is an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings.
The story begins with President Xi Jinping’s eye-catching proposals to establish a Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in 2013. However, Beijing took more than a year to form its leading group on the subject, and a year and a half to issue a single BRI guideline, which was full of vague mottos. Even the name was not meticulously drafted, experiencing changes from “One Belt, One Road” to the “Belt and Road Initiative”. That said, these fluctuations are consistent with Beijing’s framing of the BRI as mutually discussed, open, and inclusive.
Unexpectedly, this framing has caused unfettered reinterpretations even within China, and some of them totally contradict the main leadership body, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Some provincial governments simply talk of a “bridgehead” that alludes vaguely to a sense of growing military power. Other provinces have gone as far as to claim the BRI will restore China’s “historical glory”, recalling the ancient tribute system in Southeastern Asia. Some Chinese academics and military generals decipher the Initiative as a shrewd geopolitical strategy, reinforcing China’s internal policy discoordination. The NDRC purportedly has struggled to play down all of these alternative explanations, instead emphasizing economic cooperation and peaceful development.
Beijing explicitly understands the strength of policy narrative and has attempted to control the narrative of the BRI. The leading group sought to prevent the abuse of the BRI concept. According to the interview cited by Jinghan Zeng, scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Science were forbidden to speculate on the meaning and implications of the BRI after 2015.
Nevertheless, the global speculation has gone wild. In addition to the popular stereotype of the BRI as China’s strategy to achieve Asian supremacy by marginalizing the United States, the BRI has been portrayed variously as a solution to domestic economic and regional security concerns, a new category of economic globalization, the resurrection of the historical Silk Road, or a loose indeterminate scheme that includes all of the above.
So, what is the BRI? Based on the observation of its implementation, Beijing’s official statements, and my research, I would argue it is a constantly changing group of policy settings that encompasses almost all the various clarifications. Arguably, the BRI has been embedded into all other aspects of Chinese domestic policy. In other words, the BRI was first proposed as a grand and extensive policy concept or even a slogan, and was filled in with concrete content afterwards.
Undeniably, China has been attempting to peddle its influence through the BRI. Every country seeks to promote its influence abroad, and China, soon to be the world’s largest economy, has more tools to do so than most. The key question is whether the BRI masks well-thought-out, deceptive tricks – for example, the “debt trap” theory – to pursue Beijing’s regional hegemony insidiously and strategically.
Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri have stressed that China’s development financing system is too disjointed and poorly organized to be a well-prepared strategy in the implementation of the BRI. Its overseas loan and projects are easily influenced by shifting Sino-American relations and the pandemic. The so-called debt diplomacy has been massively exaggerated and overseas asset seizures have rarely occurred, based on findings from the China Africa Research Initiative, Lowy Institute, and Rhodium Group. Recently, even the Atlantic, a US media outlet, admitted this.
Regarding the BRI’s sensitive military influence, even former US diplomats and such scholars as Daniel Russel and Blake Berger have acknowledged that some of the BRI ports are only commercially designed and almost impossible to be employed militarily. Even after the headline-grabbing lease of Hambantota port in Sri Lanka to a Chinese company, there has been no record of any Chinese military operation in or around Hambantota, as indicated by Jones, Hameiri and Jonathan Hillman.
In practice, the piecemeal realization of BRI projects is determined by local governments and their related political and economic interests via diverse and time-consuming bilateral interaction with Beijing. Frankly, the implementation of some BRI projects is messy, chaotic, and beset with vanity and illusion. Even the pro-BRI official advisory group confessed that the BRI has neither a centralized coordinating mechanism nor a clear set of underpinning work streams.
The BRI is nowadays like a growing adolescent during puberty. It genuinely aims to do things, but rarely contemplate the “why” and “how”. Local politicians seize opportunities to promise their voters economic miracles, rarely questioning the utility of proposed infrastructure. Taking BRI projects in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for examples, the three sides have ambition in abundance but lack clear practical execution. In some extreme cases in Sri Lanka, Chinese firms bizarrely finalized the feasibility study for their own proposed projects. Or alternatively, local governments spend little money to assess the project’s practicality and its potential market profits, but squander a lot on ceremonies to celebrate half-done projects.
Beijing undoubtedly knows all of the issues surrounding the BRI and measures have possibly been taken to avoid them. Understandably, China prefers not to disclose these publicly, as face saving has been widely recognized as the imperative of its foreign policy, an artifact of its traditional culture.
However, the most important takeaway is this: The BRI is not and never has been a strategy, but instead is an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings. In other words, an “initiative”, which is the word the world usually misses in its global narratives.
This article was first published in The Diplomat. It has been republished at the request of the author.
Jon (Yuan) Jiang is a Chinese PhD student in the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, focusing on the Belt and Road Initiative. He completed his master’s degree of political science at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and bachelor’s degree of law at Shanghai University. As a Russian speaker, he worked with ZTE Corporation as an account manager, and as a special correspondent with Asia Weekly and Pengpai News, all in Moscow. He tweets at @jiangyuan528
Comments
21 responses to “The continuing mystery of the Belt and Road Initiative”
USA is at war with many countries at the moment, but has not used military force, yet. It is sanctioning them. Restricting medical and food imports to realign business interests to enrich the people who own the USA.
The opposite strategy is to trade with countries. That requires access to seas, currently controlled by 5 Eyes. Land based initiatives are therefore playing to the strength of land based countries and the eventual inevitable decline of sea based economies. By connecting countries, they will be enriched. 5 Eyes owners do not want this!
The media peddle lies.
BRI is just another way of carrying on trade. Something the Yankee should welcome. Who is really in charge in the USA?
Biden is a ventriloquist’s silent dummy.
It appears to me that any initiative like the the BRI, particularly due to its size and extent will always have “an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings”. This is particularly the case when part of the clear reason the CCP came up with the idea was because of their knowledge of the US’s China containment policy, a US initiative designed to limit China’s economic and power growth. It’s completely obvious now, even though the US denied it for years.
America is the only bully allowed on the block, and pathetic Australia follows the leader way out of its depth.
The BRI is a huge undertaking requiring many new adaptations according to the countries involved, so many things are unknowns as it progresses. The Belt part of the BRI across Central Asia is about having other pathways and markets to rely on if there was any kind of conflict in the South China Sea or the Malacca Straits. How would China survive if its ports and ships are blocked by an enemy forcing control over its sea lanes? I would go so far as to say that is why they built the sand islands as a buffer of defence before the mainland and the sea ports. While China displays some re-structuring around BRI policy, in countries like Australia we cannot even come up with a proper energy policy after more than 20 years. Just think of the number of policy failures and redirections, some even breaking constitutional law as well, over the last nearly 8 years. And if a new government is elected everything concerning policy will be rebooted again with new replacement programs. That’s the problem with two party states, so much time is lost in bickering and fighting, and now partisan play is at its peak. Policies are changed simply because the other opposition party invented them. easy to see in Australia and the US.
And on saving face? This is not unique to China and Asia. Just look at the monumental face saving from Donald Trump who still cannot accept he lost an election, and look what happens here for attorney generals and defence ministers.
In Australia the BRI has been turned into something akin to evil by both the government and the media.They can’t even tolerate Victoria signing a basic MoU. Dan Andrews became “Chairman Dan” over that from our sick and racist news sources in turn triggered by the Liberal government prejudice. And in our Pacific and local regions, China has become prominent in BRI deals simply because Australia has failed with its diplomacy. We’ve essentially tried to put the natives back in their corner over matters like climate change and foreign aid and forced those countries to choose between China and Australia. The result is appalling relationships with our neighbours who see that they have more in common and get a better deal with China than Australia.
Australia is left pontificating about how these countries should behave, but they are all waking up to their colonialist pasts and exploitation from any number of imperialist countries. China has experienced the same, so they they share this in common.
White Australia has to stop being the big bwana, but that will never happen with the ship of fools we have in federal office here at the moment.