Five myths about China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Washington. But critics caution that the project, which began in 2013,stokes corruption, harms the environment, creates financial dependencies and extends Chinese military power. The BRI is ambiguous by design, giving birth to several myths.

Myth No. 1: China is spending trillions of dollars.

“China’s $8 trillion construction programme ‘riskiest environmental project in history,’” warned a British headline last year. The New York Times has called it “China’s $1 Trillion Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order.” Exact figures are elusive, because the BRI is loosely defined, ever-expanding and open-ended. Many estimates reflect China’s promises for infrastructure investment, only a fraction of which has been delivered so far. According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, China had spent roughly $400 billion as of mid-2018. The highest estimates tend to count all trade and investment between China and partner countries, mistakenly attributing it all to the BRI, or they conflate the BRI’s size with the world’s needs for infrastructure.

Compared with those needs, the BRI doesn’t look so big. Asia alone requires $26 trillion for infrastructure by 2030 to maintain growth and adapt to climate change, according to the Asian Development Bank. That provides an opportunity for countries to shape and benefit from the world’s infrastructure boom. Officials in Beijing have allowed BRI estimates to balloon for political gains, but Chinese lending has been declining and faces head winds. The country’s foreign reserves have dropped since the BRI was announced.

Myth No. 2: Military motives drive the BRI.

China’s “efforts to build ports around the world aren’t because they want to be good shipbuilders and stewards of waterways, but rather they have a state national security element to each and every one of them,”Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned. “It is a concerted, strategic endeavour by China to gain a foothold and displace the US and our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region,” the head of US Pacific Command said last year.

To be sure, most infrastructure can serve both commercial and military purposes. Some BRI projects, like ports in Pakistan and elsewhere, could eventually benefit China’s military or encourage its expansion. But to date, the BRI is mostly an economic and political programme with military implications, rather than the other way around.

Ultimately, China’s desire to find new markets for its bloated state-owned enterprises is a stronger motivating force than the quest for military power. China is home to seven of the world’s 10 largest construction firms and used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the US did during the entire 20th century.

Myth No. 3: Chinese projects are cheap.

China’s partners often claim they have struck great deals. “The Chinese Government and China’s export import bank will offer better conditions than any development bank loan available in Europe,” Hungary’s minister of foreign affairs and trade explained in 2016. “Our banks don’t offer these kinds of interest rates,” the head of Malaysia’s Finance Ministry said in 2017.

But the BRI is a middleman’s dream, offering up big projects with little oversight, and China’s opaque lending practices increase the risk of cost inflation and corruption. After reports of missing funds, including some related to Chinese projects, that same former Malaysian finance minister faces jail time, as does Malaysia’s former prime minister, Najib Razak.In Myanmar, the cost of a port for which Beijing was originally planning to charge $7.3 billion was slashed to $1.3 billion after US officials sent technical experts to help review it. Without adequate oversight, officials fill their pockets, and citizens foot the bill.

When China’s offer is the only one on the table - which it often is in risky business environments - Beijing naturally presses for its own interests. Most Chinese lending is on commercial terms, with higher interest rates than standard foreign aid. Chinese firms overwhelmingly get the contracts, and deals can include other one-sided provisions.

Myth No. 4: Belt and Road is centrally run.

BRI maps depict a world in which all roads lead to Beijing. The project sounds like it’s centrally run in government white papers and speeches by Xi, who has called for the creation of six “economic corridors” that stretch across the supercontinent of Eurasia. “China’s government has taken other actions to centralize [BRI] within its foreign policy,” explains a US Defence Department report, pointing to those corridors as well as Chinese policy planning and aid coordination groups.

But the reality is messy on the ground, where interest groups within and outside China are shaping activities to suit their own agendas. Xi’s six corridors remain mostly aspirational; there is little evidence that more projects are happening within them than outside them. With projects in the Arctic, cyberspace and outer space, managing everything may be impossible. .

Myth No. 5: The Silk Road is returning.

The BRI was initially divided into two components, the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, names that evoke the travels of explorers like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. In the years since, advocates of the project have embraced this romanticized marketing device. “I hope President Xi’s visit will further strengthen the ties between Italy and China: two countries that, since Marco Polo’s time, have a long-lasting friendly commercial relationship, built and developed along the Silk Road,” a senior Italian official wrote this spring when defending Italy’s recent decision to join the BRI. When a train from China arrived in London in 2017, on the first direct freight route between the two countries, the Telegraph declared it “a new chapter in the history of the centuries-old trading route.”

Hillman is the director of the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He first filed this report for the Post

Overland trade is not making an epochal comeback, since 90 percent of the world’s goods travel by sea, but great-power competition is. A better comparison is the struggle among colonial powers that lasted from the mid-19th century to World War I. Many of the BRI’s key technologies - deep-water ports, high-speed railways and fiber optic cables - are descendants of technology that Western powers leveraged during this period to expand their access to foreign markets. Britain, Germany and the United States pursued major infrastructure plans at great costs. In some places, China is literally replacing and retracing colonial projects, building railways in Africa and laying data cables under the sea. ENDS

Hillman is the director of the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He first filed this report for Washington Post