My Take | No grand geopolitical strategy behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative
- New study by the influential Royal Institute of International Affairs finds the ‘debt-trap’ claims often made by the US against Beijing’s sprawling infrastructure-financing programme to seize host countries’ valuable assets are simply false
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has raised many legitimate issues and questions, but a hidden agenda to lay “debt traps” for developing countries to take over their valuable assets or commodities is not one of them.
Many independent economists, think tanks and international bodies agree the mega development initiative has been driven by economics, primarily China’s own domestic overcapacity and overproduction, rather than any grand geopolitical ambition to take over the world.
Yet, that has been the most consistent misrepresentation by Washington. US Vice-President Mike Pence criticised China in October 2018 for using “debt-trap diplomacy” in Sri Lanka to establish a “forward military base for China’s growing blue-water navy”.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly warned countries not to join the BRI not only because of the supposed debt traps, rather they risk angering the United States and affect their bilateral relations.
A new study by the influential London-based Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, has observed that the geopolitical narrative is convincing only because it’s easy to understand for its sheer simplicity; it’s also false. To understand the economics, though, requires case-by-case consideration involving dozens of countries.
“The BRI simply cannot unfold according to a unilateral Chinese strategy,” the report said. “It can only develop gradually, through bilateral negotiations with over 130 partners; it is co-created through countless, fragmented interactions.”
Quite simply, the BRI involves too many moving parts and vested interests within China’s public sector and bureaucracy, most of which have been driven by profits rather than politics. Some projects actually predate BRI by years, some even by decades, and have only been put under BRI to give “more meat to the bone”, so to speak.
