The BRI, part of Xi Jinping’s ‘China dream’ to ‘revitalise the Chinese nation’, is a two-fold project: a belt to link the great Eurasian continent with overland railways, highways, pipelines and other infrastructure, and a road to link China with Southeast Asia and even Africa through ports and other maritime linkages. Collectively, it was known as ‘One Belt, One Road (OBOR)’ but is now usually referred to as the BRI.
The BRI comes at a time when global divisions are intensifying. Diverse nationalisms with the potential for serious conflict are becoming more marked. Economic globalisation and free-trade once seemed so eminently desirable that few dared go against them. Yet there is now less consensus about the benefits.
The BRI’s primary aim is economic. One major objective is to reduce disparities in China by spurring growth in the country’s underdeveloped hinterland and rustbelt. At the World Economic Forum in January 2017, it was Xi Jinping — the first Chinese president to attend — who took the lead in supporting globalisation and opposing protectionism. Xi Jinping stated flatly in the forum’s opening speech that ‘just blaming economic globalisation for the world’s problems is inconsistent with reality, and it will not help solve the problems’.
Late in 2014, the Chinese government set up the New Silk Road Fund and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to promote infrastructure that would support the trade and other economic linkages involved in the BRI. Around the same time, operations on a railway line linking Yiwu, a county-level city in Zhejiang Province, with the Spanish capital Madrid, had begun. Another major development is the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Some commentators see the primary objective of the BRI as domestic, believing it is largely aimed at reducing disparities. It is also likely that China sees the BRI as a potential bulwark against Islamist terrorism in Xinjiang and along its western borders, since economic development is the best reinforcement against political instability. But the foreign policy dimensions of the BRI are also extremely important.
The investment promised by the BRI is large enough to invite comparison with the US Marshall Plan that revived European economies in the wake of World War II. Less positively, it is suggested that China is trying to economically take over the countries of Central Asia and elsewhere.
In May 2017, Xi Jinping sponsored the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. Attendees included more than 30 heads of organisations and heads of states such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Indonesian President Joko Widodo, as well as then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The attendance suggests great enthusiasm for the BRI at a government level.
One country that is definitely not enthusiastic about the BRI is India, who is wary about China’s increasing ties with Pakistan and Russia. There were no Indian representatives at the forum in May. The advance of Indian troops in June to stop China building a road in Bhutan resulted in a serious faceoff, although negotiations resulted in a solution late in August, the deterioration in relations in more long-term. Along with several other countries, India is nervous about the strategic implications of China’s access to Pakistan’s deep-water port of Gwadar, which would open China and its land-locked territory of Xinjiang to the Persian Gulf.
In some respects India and China are trying to cooperate. India (and Pakistan) joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2016, while the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Forum links the two Asian giants in a grouping loosely united to promote the interests of emerging market economies vis-à-vis the West. But long-term rivalry and hostility between China and India continues to make sustained cooperation difficult.
While governments are mostly keen on the BRI, viewing it as offering economic expansion and greater prosperity, many ordinary people are less convinced. China’s image in Central Asia is highly mixed, and there are people who view China’s economic expansion as inevitable but pernicious. They resent the fact that Chinese companies bring their own workers with them, so local people gain little employment.
Opinion in the West is also divided. While many observers and businesspeople see opportunities in the BRI for profits and growth, others doubt project viability and feasibility. Sceptics regard it as too inefficiently organised to be sustainable, and the main countries involved as not committed or economically competent enough to make it work. Many are suspicious of Chinese motives, regarding it as a plot to regain China’s traditional power over regions to its west. This is in part fear of China, and anxiety that the West and its interests will be eclipsed.
It is unclear if the BRI will succeed in the short term. China’s image appears to have worsened over the last few years and is now undergoing another serious downturn due to global reaction over Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s death. But what the West thinks may not be the crucial factor in the long term. In all likelihood, the impact of the BRI over the next several decades will be huge. It will transform interchanges across Eurasia and with Africa, and be a major boost to China’s world economic and strategic influence.
Colin Mackerras is Emeritus Professor at Griffith Business School, Griffith University.
An extended version of this article was first published here on Asian Currents.
This is, no doubt, an interesting analysis but let’s be more positive.
1 “In all likelihood, the impact of the BRI over the next several decades will be huge.”
This is true because lest we forget Napoleon once cautioned: “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.”
China is now awakened after Premier Deng Xiao Ping enunciated in 1978 that “The colour of the cat does not count (anymore) but whether it can catch mice.” The flawed Marxist ideology was tossed out of the proverbial window.
In just 39 years after the ‘colour of the cat’ allegory, China has risen to become the 2nd largest economy in the world and the world’s largest trading nation, with an investment ‘war-chest’ of more than US$3 trillion.
By 2020, China’s GDP is slated to double to 92 trillion RMB from 2010. With a successful implementation of the BRI, China’s GDP could double again by 2036, applying the mathematical rule of 72, if the GDP growth is just 4.5per cent.
By then, there could be an ‘October Surprise’ when China announces that the RMB henceforth will be backed by gold and silver, thus replacing the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
2 “It will transform interchanges across Eurasia and with Africa, and be a major boost to China’s world economic and strategic influence.”
This is true because on page 31 of his book ‘The Grand Chessboard’, Dr Brzezinski, an advisor to 5 US presidents, from J.F. Kennedy to Bush I, pontificated that “A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent.”
He added, “About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
3 There was an earlier type of egregious globalization after Christopher Columbus set sail to the New World (Cathay) in 1492, when Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France and Britain ‘shook the world’ with a repugnant competitive initiative called ICI or ‘Invade and Conquer Initiative’, when they colonized more than half the world between themselves until the mid 20th century. They prospered by looting the natural resources of the colonies and committed gross human rights violations, including slavery and genocide.
The ideals of Democracy and the French’s clarion call for Liberté, égalité, fraternité meant little, when greed overcame the passion of these Conquistadors.
4 But China is not about to ‘shake the world’ with ICI. Rather, she is proposing to share with Eurasia a better future not with Machiavellian intrigues and wars but with high-speed rail and internet connectivity, infrastructure developments plus commerce and trade.
As an example, the Southern Transport Corridor (STC) is a network of railroads linking Chongqing to Qinzhou Port in southern Guangxi province, a gateway to South-east Asia, including Singapore by sea.
In the past, it took 3 weeks from Singapore to Chongqing by sea via Shanghai, thence up the Yangtze River. When the STC is ready it will takes only one week by sea and rail.
When the BRI is fully implemented, high-quality consumer goods and parts will be sent by high-speed rail from Russia and the EU to the central Asian republics and to China and vice versa.
Greece will experience an economic revival. She will benefit enormously as consumer goods from Asia pass through the port of Piraeus, en-route to the EU. The world–class oil and gas deposits from Tajikistan and the Caspian Sea will be piped to the world.
Japan and South Korea will cease being ‘Client States’ of the US. Russia and Japan will sign a peace treaty and so will the two Koreas eventually. Japan will be linked by rail via an undersea tunnel to Eastern Russia and then to China. The peaceful reunification of Korea will leverage on the estimated US$10 trillion of mineral wealth in the north, including the world’s biggest deposits of rare earths.
5 India’s rejection of the BRI is done at her own peril. Her violation of the 1890 Sino-British Convention by crossing the Sikkim-Tibet border into the Dolam plateau to intervene in the building of a dirt road from the ‘Turning Point’, situated in China’s Doklam territory (Dong Lang in Chinese) and NOT in Bhutan, was a miscalculation. But since India is a member of BRICS and the SCO, she will soon come to her senses.
6 Meanwhile, the United States, arguably the sole but fast-waning superpower is promoting a new form of globalization, called BRU or “Bombs R Us”, backed by 6,500 nuclear bombs and a military empire of more than 900 military and supply bases globally.
But since she is hobbled by a National Debt of more than US$20 trillion plus an unfunded debt of US$222 trillion in 2012, according to Boston University’s Economics professor, Lawrence Kotlikoff, the BRU initiative may have to face the inevitable.
7 Which is a better initiative for the benefit of the world? ICI, BRI or BRU? The answer is obvious.
A well argued response, with optimistic views that we both share. But you and I know everything is not so black and white. Disgust with the west’s rapacious past does not add up to giving China a pass. The Chinese Empire was once a great colonists on its own, exacting tribute from countries it conquered. Certainly EurAsia and Africa are in bad need of economic and financial development, a policy that the world should support. Utopian dreams need to be tempered with a good dose of skepticism. Keep writing. You do it well.
1 Thank you Bob. I am glad you share an optimistic view of the BRI too because the alternative is unsavory and a descent into war and destruction, especially now that North Korea upped the ante and tested a hydrogen bomb on Sunday.
2 The Belt & Road Initiative is a grandiose version of the Italian Renaissance, which began in the 14th century and which ultimately led to the European Renaissance. It spread from Tuscany in central Italy to Florence, which rose to prominence in the arts, capital investments and banking. Then Venice became a small ‘empire’ in the Mediterranean as it controlled much of the trade routes to the East, especially with the Arabs, who were the early-birds in the lucrative trade with China even before the 13th century.
In the same vein, many cities will rise to great prominence during the implementation of the BRI.
3 It is true that there is no moral equivalency between ICI, the ‘Invade and Conquer Initiative’ of the Western colonialists and the BRI. China is not asking for a privileged ‘pass’. The BRI is not an altruistic mission but a ‘Trade Mission’, predicated upon high-speed rail and internet connectivity, infrastructure investments plus commerce and trade.
China has arguably no bitter memory of the so-called ‘century of humiliation’ by the rampaging West and two Opium Wars, because, in my view, at the material time China was under the rule of another invader, the Manchus, during the Qing Dynasty.
In fact, President Xi set all that aside and pledged during a speech in Singapore on 7 Nov 2015, that “a strong China will never bully any weak nation and a rich China will never humiliate any poor nation”.
4 During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD), China was arguably the world’s only maritime “Superpower‟ from 1405 to 1433 even before the Europeans could set sail in the high seas and vast oceans. Why? Because in the 7th century China invented the magnetic compass, without which no mariner could sail the high Seas and oceans then. Today, there is the convenience of satellite navigation and the GPS.
Prof T.K. Chang, Professor of Politics at Ball University, wrote in a 1991 paper that “(i)n 1405, the Ming Emperor sent Admiral Zheng He, as a special envoy and in command of 27,800 naval officers and men in sixty-two warships for a 2 year voyage of exploration of the South China Sea and to as far as East Africa.”
But Admiral Zheng He (pronounced ‘her”) had no mandate from the Ming Emperor to colonize any nation. In fact, in his other 6 voyages of discovery he set sail with many ‘Treasure Ships’ laden with Ming-blue porcelains, celadons, ceramics, silks, and all sorts of objet d′art to seek tributes and expand commerce and trade but not to colonize any country.
The tributary states benefitted as they were under the protection of the Ming and Qing Emperors. They were not colonies per se. They were under the suzerainty of China and they could maintained self-rule.
5 But some might argue that China colonized Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. This is not true. Tibet was annexed by the Mongols in the 13th century and brought into China as a province during the Yuan Dynasty (1271 to 1368). When the Yuan Dynasty ended, the Mongols fled north and left behind Tibet and Inner Mongolia.
Xinjiang was annexed by the Manchu invaders and brought into China as a province during the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912). When that dynasty fell in 1912, Xinjiang became a Special Autonomic Region of China and Manchuria became a part of China.
6 It’s true that “Utopian dreams need to be tempered with a good dose of skepticism”. The BRI, like any business venture, operates under Murphy’s laws, all three of them: 1) that if anything can go wrong it will, 2) that nothing is as easy as it looks and 3) that everything takes longer than you think.
China has no illusions about the BRI that it is walk in the park. She built the Great Wall and she knows how monumentally difficult a task that was. But if any country can pull off the audacious Belt and Road Initiative it will be China, unless the US-sponsored Jihadist terrorists stand in the way. Even that will be swept aside eventually by the free market.
7 But let’s be positive as the BRI is inclusive. Every country is welcome to hitch a wagon and join the high-speed rails or hitch a ride in the super container ships in the modern ‘Silk Road’ to exchange goods, skills and ideas in the Eurasian Renaissance.
8 Australia arguably has some of the best miners in the world and has two of the four world-class iron ore deposits (hematite which has 65% iron content) in the Pilbara region, where BHP-Billiton and Rio Tinto reign. The third world-class iron ore deposits are in Brazil, owned by Vale and the fourth is the Semandou iron ore mine which is under dispute resolution in Guinea in West Africa.
Maybe, a fifth will be discovered in the mountains of Eurasia in the future and then the plot thickens.
9 The BRI needs a prodigious amount of iron ores, copper, nickel, aluminium, lead, tungsten and zinc, etc plus literally hundreds of thousands of tons of primary produce, wheat, barley, canola, rice and beef, which are all abundant in Australia.
10 The good news is that Australia’s FIRB has reportedly approved the sale of the giant Kidman cattle property, save the small holdings near to the sensitive Woomera range, to Australia’s billionaire Ms Gina Rinehart (holding 65%) and her partner, CRED (35%), a real estate conglomerate based in Shanghai. Her vision is to export “800,000 cattle to China through Broome, Darwin and Townsville, effectively doubling Australia’s total live exports.”
These sorts of ‘win-win’ large scale export of beef cattle will dwarf the export of frozen beef from the United States and will guarantee that Australia has a premier position in the BRI, if Australia is not foolish enough to join the United States and Japan to try and contain China.
The West sure as heck lost valuable time and money in not helping Africa and those Asian countries that broke off from the Soviet Union in developing all these things that China is doing now. What a waste.
Westerners help China become an economic power by sending their factories to it for cheaper labor, little or no environmental and safety laws plus no strike. The West particularly America can’t complain about China when they help create it in the first place.
One of Britain’s Victorian generals Roberts predicted that there will be a war between America and China.