The recently concluded belt and road forum in Beijing has focused global attention on China’s gigantic scheme called Belt Road Initiative(BRI). Yet not many people can easily grasp what it is all about. In fact, it would be safe to say that it is a combination of economic planning for sustainable economic growth, market development and dominance, export of excess capacity and geopolitical assertion.
It takes a range of already existing and ongoing Chinese governmental and state owned enterprise activities in the target regions of Central, South and South-east Asia, East Africa, Middle East and the Indian Ocean region and seeks to provide them with an overall coherence and direction.
The idea of Europe-Asia land connectivity is not new, as the name suggests, the caravans plying on the Silk Road began in antiquity, and even the Trans-Siberian Railway has been around for a while. In more recent times, the idea got its fillip from the concepts of ESCAP’s Asian highway, the Asian Railway, the Asian economic corridor, ideas which have been around since the 1980s when Japan sought to be its eastern anchor. Maritime linkages between Europe and Asia, of course, have been around since antiquity, barring some periods of disruption.
The officially stated mission of the BRI is to develop links on the basis of “mutual trust, equality and mutual benefits, inclusiveness and mutual learning, and win win cooperation.” A noted Chinese scholar Wang Jisi has noted that, it is aimed at organically linking the Chinese dream to the Global Dream. However, others have seen it as a Chinese Marshall Plan, to promote the growth in its poorer, but vulnerable, western regions, as well as adjacent and strategic Central Asia. Or, a pivot towards Eurasia, in response to the American rebalance to Asia.
Most people in India, including the government, is focusing on Chinese activity in our neighbourhood such as the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, or Chinese infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka. But these are sideshows, the BRI is a much more ambitious scheme.
What it seeks to do is to compact a large region comprising of the Indian Ocean littoral and Eurasia through highways, high-speed rail lines, pipelines and maritime linkages. Eurasia covers 70 per cent of the world’s population, 75 per cent of its energy resources and 70 per cent of its GDP.
Through enhanced diplomatic coordination, standardised trade facilitation, customs procedures, free trade zones, it seeks to take China’s economy to a new plane, even while integrating those of the participant countries with its own economy. While this appears to be a mercantilist project, it is inevitably accompanied and synchronised with an expanded Chinese military footprint.
China will become the dominant regional power in East and Central Asia in the short term, and a major Indian Ocean power by the 2030s. By 2049, China hopes to emerge as the principal pole of the economically and diplomatically integrated Eurasia-- a geopolitical rival of the United States.
Many countries view this as a chance to get onto the economic growth bandwagon. They are heartened at the prospect of getting investment to enhance their infrastructure and industry, but the way this is structured, also means a growing economic inter-dependence on China.
All said and done, the BRI is aimed at promoting Chinese national interests interests and notwithstanding claims that they pursue a “win-win” model, there will be losers and winners in the process.
The disruption created by BRI can have a negative fallout for countries like India and Russia which view South and Central Asia respectively as part of their own sphere of influence. But the reality is that Central and South Asia or Africa is not what BRI is all about; its principal economic goals relate to tying rich Europe close to a China that is becoming richer over the next two or three decades.
For India, blocking the BRI is not feasible, ignoring it would be self-defeating; New Delhi needs to work with like-minded states on a strategy that can persuade China to make it a participatory exercise or, minismise its downsides to its own economic and geopolitical standing by devising ways and means to use BRI to its own ends.
As for India’s concerns over CPEC, surely there are ways in which this can be addressed. The projects there are not the first to be taken up in an area which is disputed. As for Pakistan-China strategic ties, well, they have been around for the last fifty years and more and have been factored into India’s defence planning already.
