Has the Belt and Road Initiative achieved its objective?

Thoughts after reading 'The end of the Chinese century: How Xi Jinping lost the Belt and Road Initiative' by Bertil Lintner

When the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initially called One Belt One Road (OBOR) was announced in 2013 by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, it was supposed to be much bigger and grander than the American Marshall plan. According to Chinese narrative, OBOR is an attempt to revive the ancient silk trade route it had with Europe. But if we take a closer look at history, we understand that these were actually trades that happened via intermediary countries, crossed various land & sea borders; and not in one single stretch. The goods got transferred between several hands and there is no evidence of a fixed, separate ancient silk route to have existed as China claims.

China has never backed away from grabbing an opportunity to cooperate with another nation to invest economically so as to acquire the raw materials needed for their development. Currently the Russian far east has been an area of Chinese influence due to the migration happening across the borders due to the availability of raw materials in the Russian side and the labourers and processing of the same by Chinese industries. This region has been a place for sending the political prisoners of Russia from the past and the natives here have migrated to Moscow and other city centres. So the current demography of Russian far east comprises mostly the descendants of political prisoners, the Chinese workers and the local tribes in small numbers. At present, China and Russia have cooperation agreement in agriculture, tourism, and infrastructure in the Russian far east. Russian far east being rich in natural resources helps in the development of Chinese Northeast. The rising economic dominance of China makes China the powerful of the two neighbours discussed above and this cooperation has also come with its own conflicts and claims over regions along the border. The Chinese have not forgotten the exploitation and atrocities their people faced in the past. For example, the Blagoveshchensk massacre and other killings of Chinese and Asians in the 1930s.

China has attempted to introduce BRI in several of its neighbouring nations to get an access to the Indian Ocean and the ports they have. They have had little success in many of these including Pakistan (where the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is undertaken as part of BRI with China aiming an access to the Indian Ocean via Gwadar port), where there have been hostilities towards Chinese scientists and engineers working there. The only success they have seen so far is in Myanmar, where there is Junta rule/ army rule, which is said to be supported by Russians and Chinese. Myanmar has become the gateway of China to the Indian Ocean. The attempt to explore the resource rich Central Asian countries by launching the BRI from Kazakhstan in 2013 also has recently faced backlash from local population.

The leap of China into the islands in Indian Ocean is more of geostrategic importance rather than ideology or resource extraction. This is mainly to locate the strategic points in the Indian Ocean and set up a naval or military base by drowning the small countries in heavy debt in the name of BRI, which obviously leads them to hand over their land and assets on lease to China. All BRI projects here have a common angle where China promises the other nation of grand projects for their overall development under the umbrella BRI scheme. This eventually leads them to take heavy debt from Chinese banks and firms, leading to leasing their important assets like ports to China. The BRI has ended up being a project that benefits China; mostly building facilities to extract raw materials and connectivity to bring them to the port from which it gets taken to China.

In the pacific, majority of the island nations of Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia groups have diplomatically recognized Taiwan over China. But China has been successful in turning most of these nations to their side diplomatically. This has been fuelled by the negligence of these nations by the US and its allies after the world war 2 and cold war, when this region was of strategic importance. Now as China wants to create a space for itself in the west pacific, it has been successful in roping in the countries in this region into BRI. But it has had its up and downs, especially in some island nations when Chinese traders outnumbered and outperformed the local traders, it led to civil clashes. If China overcomes these minor obstacles and keeps away other powers from influencing over the countries in this region it is all set to become an important player here.

These days China is expanding its presence in the digital space under the name 'Digital silk road', which includes deployment of telecom networks, broadband connectivity, cross-border digital trade, etc.

In October 2023, on the tenth anniversary of OBOR/ BRI it got rebranded with new slogan 'small is beautiful'. This was to turn away the highlight from the overstretched projects that were undertaken under BRI. The projects generally were not able to generate enough revenue and never became profitable in the long run economically. The focus of China is currently to label all the big and small projects they invest in and construct in other nations as a BRI initiative and highlight it as a success.

Finally as we glimpse over the Belt and Road Initiative, the question remains: What has China or the host country achieved out of this? Was it a partial success? How will China maneuver the deficit in trust on them by the global community after knowing the original intentions of BRI and how it has benefitted China more than the nation hosting the project? Also, the environmental impact of such projects in ecologically sensitive areas are often thrown in the air and who is going to be responsible for it?