The strangely named “One Road” component consists of ports and facilities to increase seaborne traffic from East Asia and connect these countries to the “One Belt”, giving them a way to move their goods overland, rather than across two oceans, as they currently do.

The China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which the US earlier this year refused to join, is designed, in part, to finance the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. But the project’s investment requirements will dwarf the resources of the proposed new institution.

Indeed, “One Belt, One Road” represents a striking departure in Chinese policy. For the first time, China is seeking to export its development model to other countries. Chinese companies, of course, have been hugely active throughout Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa in the past decade, investing in commodities and extractive industries, and the infrastructure needed to move them to China.

But “One Belt, One Road” is different: its purpose is to develop industrial capacity and consumer demand in countries outside of China. Rather than extracting raw materials, China is seeking to shift its heavy industry to less developed countries, making them richer and encouraging demand for Chinese products.

China’s development model is different from the one currently fashionable in the West. It is based on massive state-led investments in infrastructure – roads, ports, electricity, railways and airports – that facilitate industrial development. American economists abjure this build-it-and-they-will-come path, owing to concerns about corruption and self-dealing when the state is so heavily involved. In recent years, by contrast, US and European development strategy has focused on large investments in public health, women’s empowerment, support for global civil society and anti-corruption measures.

Laudable as these Western goals are, no country has ever got rich by investing in them alone. Public health is an important background condition for sustained growth; but if a clinic lacks reliable electricity and clean water, or there are no good roads leading to it, it won’t do much good.

China’s infrastructure-based strategy has worked remarkably well in China itself, and was an important component of the strategies pursued by other East Asian countries, from Japan to South Korea to Singapore.

The big question for the future of global politics is straightforward: Whose model will prevail? If “One Belt, One Road” meets Chinese planners’ expectations, the whole of Eurasia, from Indonesia to Poland, will be transformed in the coming generation. China’s model will blossom outside China, raising incomes and thus demand for Chinese products to replace stagnating markets in other parts of the world.

Polluting industries, too, will be offloaded to other parts of the world. Rather than being at the periphery of the global economy, Central Asia will be at its core. And China’s form of authoritarian government will gain immense prestige, implying a large negative effect on democracy worldwide.

But there are important reasons to question whether “One Belt, One Road” will succeed. Infrastructure-led growth has worked well in China up to now because the Chinese government could control the political environment. This will not be the case abroad, where instability, conflict and corruption will interfere with Chinese plans.

Indeed, China has already found itself confronting angry stakeholders, nationalistic legislators and fickle friends in places like Ecuador and Venezuela, where it already has massive investments. China has dealt with restive Muslims in its own Xinjiang ( 新疆 ) province largely through denial and repression; similar tactics won’t work in Pakistan or Kazakhstan.

This does not mean, however, that the US and other Western governments should sit by complacently and wait for China to fail. The strategy of massive infrastructure development may have reached a limit inside China, and it may not work in foreign countries, but it is still critical to global growth.

The US used to build massive dams and road networks back in the 1950s and 1960s, until such projects fell out of fashion. Today, the US has relatively little to offer developing countries in this regard. President Barack Obama’s “Power Africa” initiative is a good one, but it has been slow to get off the ground; efforts to build the Fort Liberté port in Haiti have been a fiasco.

The US should have become a founding member of the AIIB; it could yet join and move China towards greater compliance with international environmental, safety and labour standards.

READ MORE: Hong Kong will be “super connector” to mainland China under ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy

At the same time, the US and other Western countries need to ask themselves why infrastructure has become so difficult to build, not just in developing countries but at home as well. Unless we do, we risk ceding the future of Eurasia and other important parts of the world to China and its development model.

Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University and director of the Centre on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His most recent book is Political Order and Political Decay. Copyright: Project Syndicate