My Take | Belt and Road Initiative resurrects West’s old paranoia about Asiatic domination
- In a well-known perceptual trick, people see a drawing that is either of a duck or a rabbit; likewise, with the belt and road strategy, Chinese think in terms of win-win economic opportunities but the West, especially the US, sees nothing but threats and zero-sum games
There is an intriguing idea in international relations study called “a perceptual shock”. It denotes any single event that suddenly makes decision-makers aware of the cumulative effect of gradual long-term power trends, the proverbial alarm bell or wake-up call. The Soviets’ success with Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite in 1957, was such a shock for the United States. Suddenly, American technological supremacy no longer seemed assured.
Certainly, it is not a one-off event, but a multi-year project that has upended long-standing Western assumptions about China’s global ambitions and capabilities. You can argue the “shock” has been more gradual, not a short sharp one. Still, for Westerners, though, especially American policymakers long accustomed to the thesis of “China’s imminent collapse, any time now”, the country’s rise to being the world’s second-largest economy has been a huge shock.
But then, there is the unmistakably perceptual part. You may remember a famous ambiguous drawing which looks like either a duck or a rabbit. What do geopolitical strategists and military experts in China and the US see when they look at a map of the belt and road?