Among the news items and analyses from this week, three articles are of particular interest, as they draw attention to different yet comparable weaknesses of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The first [China’s Signalling Under President Xi Jinping] presents a very adversarial interpretation of the BRI from an Indian perspective. In the wake of the power consolidation marked by the 19th Chinese Communist Party National Congress, the author stresses how China’s posture has become not only more assertive, but even hegemonic in nature. He points not only at the military side, highlighting the recent Doklam standoff between Beijing and New Delhi as well as China’s demand that India not interfere in the South China Sea disputes, but also at BRI- related economic issues. The BRI, he notes, is developing in a very top-down fashion which ignores the specificities of local contexts and agendas, as evident for instance in how the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passes straight through disputed territory with India, and in the potentially dangerous amount of debt many African countries are building up vis-à-vis China, which might even trigger a debt crisis in a not-so-remote future.
The second article [Will China’s belt and road torch burn Malaysia?] offers a less negative perspective on the BRI, stressing how Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia have been competing to attract Chinese investments to strengthen their infrastructures. In November 2016, the Malaysian Prime Minister’s trip to China secured some $31bn worth of deals with Beijing. However, it also points at the dangers of cosying-up unconditionally to China, as this might be easily interpreted by critics as ‘selling off’ the country and therefore lead to domestic and international instability. Finally, the third article [China’s 'Digital Silk Road': Pitfalls Among High Hopes] stresses China’s high hopes of using the BRI to export its burgeoning ICT know-how to improve sustainable economic growth across Eurasia. The problem, according to the author, is that this is also being done according to a very top-down approach, which ignores institutional weaknesses in many of the (envisaged) partners. Thus, all three articles underscore the need for China to adjust its connectivity plans to make them more substantially inclusive, developing meaningful dialogues with all countries affected in order to minimise risks linked to a lack of knowledge of the highly diverse domestic contexts.
Francesco S. Montesano
This week's Silk Road Headlines
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