Angie Cui. Originally published in Winter 2018.
Beijing Language and Culture University’s main lecture hall is a short, curved building paneled with reflective white tiles. During my time studying in Beijing this summer, I would walk past it every morning before reaching my classroom building on campus. Across the panels of the hall stretched a light teal banner that read, “Belt and Road Forum for Language Resources.” Beijing summers are hot and humid, so I never had the patience or wherewithal to figure out the meaning of that English subheading under a slew of Mandarin characters, even as I walked by that teal banner five days a week.
The next time I came across that phrase was during a week-long research trip to Anhui, an agricultural province far from the metropolises of China. There was a large, fading sticker slapped on the wall of a stone bridge. The rough translation read, “The Belt and Road Initiative will bring us to economic prosperity.” This time, the slogan piqued my interest. What kind of “Belt and Road” extends from initiatives concerning language resources to economic prosperity, or extends from a global city like Beijing to a rural province like Anhui?
A One Trillion Dollar Pathway
As it turns out, this Belt and Road is a part of the massive infrastructural project at the center of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy. Although it was announced in 2013 and has become a defining characteristic of Xi’s plan for China, the project has barely drawn American public interest.
The scope of the project is ambitious. At its core, the initiative is a plan to invest in land and maritime infrastructures to link China with its trade partners in the Eurasian region. It consists of two main components: a land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” through Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and the “Maritime Silk Road,” which includes Southeast Asia, Oceania and North Africa. The hope is to expand China’s economic and geopolitical influence by creating new markets and building strong bilateral relationships.
The idea is to harness what has made Chinese development in the past decades so miraculous — stronger infrastructure, better connectivity, advanced transportation — as a form of political leverage. This is done through a series of bilateral agreements between China and various interested parties that delineate the particular type of investment and aid on a case-by-case basis. By offering soft geopolitical aid to its regional allies and neighbors in the form of technological and infrastructural knowledge and economic investment, China can utilize its toolbox for modernization as a new means of bringing countries closer into its economic and political orbit.
US commentators refer to the Belt and Road Initiative as China’s Marshall Plan. But its budget? About USD$1 trillion, three times that of the amount of US aid given to help rebuild Western European economies after World War II, by today’s dollar value. The Initiative is primarily funded by two financial institutions—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and a newly created Silk Road Fund. The AIIB, a multilateral development bank originally proposed by the People’s Republic of China in 2013, has pledged over one trillion yuan, or the equivalent of US$160billion, to the project. In 2014, China unveiled the Silk Road Fund, a state-owned development fund which draws resources from the China Development Bank, China Investment Corporation, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Both the AIIB and Silk Road Fund have since provided financial support for Belt and Road projects.
The Belt and Road’s Import: Soft Power
What exactly does China gain from this project, and why is it so willing to invest in a massive and risky initiative? The first reason is to control and expedite shipping and transportation. Most of the Belt and Road projects that have already begun focus on physical infrastructure: digging oil and gas pipelines across Central Asia, building high-speed rail corridors in Southeast Asia, even laying a 7,500-mile freight train line from Yiwu, China to London. Beijing is building a system in which the world’s roads are all connected via China, and dominating transportation infrastructure is crucial in controlling how the world trades and ships now and in the future.
The second motivation is to develop what some have labeled “soft infrastructure.” This refers to the long-term, bilateral agreements established through aid packages, trade deals, and intergovernmental agreements that incentivize countries to reorient economic and political spheres to put China in a more powerful position. In the end, the bilateral agreements signed under the Belt and Road Initiative are essentially foreign aid packages. What comes in return is a boost to China’s soft power—more UN votes, fewer barriers to trade, and a better image abroad.
Take the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), for example. It is a series of infrastructure projects that will connect Xinjiang, a western region of China, to Pakistan via a series of energy projects, railroads, and highways. It is also at the heart of the Belt and Road Initiative and is seen as a key model for what the Initiative’s projects will eventually look like. Pakistani officials predict CPEC will create upwards of two million jobs, help resolve Pakistan’s continuing energy shortage problem, and provide an alternative route to Central Asia and western China. For China, the gains are also plentiful: a new trade route, favorable bids for Chinese construction and hydropower companies, and interest on a huge loan. It will also receive credit for providing Pakistan with its first surge in foreign investment in decades, thereby improving the economy and political standing of the country.
These bilateral agreements are significant ways to accrue soft power, deemphasize military buildup, invest in foreign aid and economic cooperation, and create a positive image for China abroad. As a final hoist, the Belt and Road Initiative has now been enshrined into the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution. During the Party Congress of 2017, the Initiative was officially incorporated into China’s constitution as part of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” This signifies, at the very least, a commitment to reaching the full scope of the project as an item on the national agenda. And certainly, international leaders are cognizant of the importance of this amendment, whether they are or are not a part of the project in its current iterations. The massive Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May of this year welcomed 30 world leaders and representatives from over 60 countries, including Matthew Pottinger, a top Trump advisor and senior director of the National Security Council for East Asia.
America’s Not-So-Blissful Ignorance
The phrase “Belt and Road” was foreign to me until just months ago. It is jarring that my American classmates, roommates, and colleagues also appeared to have never heard the term before. This knowledge gap is despite the widespread international involvement by countries that have seen or have been affected by the Initiative’s projects.
The absence of Belt and Road from American public discourse is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the sheer potential of this project to alter the economic balance of the world merits our attention. Perhaps the AIIB will become a threat or an alternative to the US-backed World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Perhaps China’s sweeping bilateral agreements with countries, personalized and purely based on economic motives without regard for the country’s internal political structure or corruption levels, run against the liberal institutionalist tendency to trust multilateral organizations backed by democratic states. Perhaps it signals a continuation of or a new dimension to China’s strategic balancing of the United States in the geopolitical realm, which may eventually cause a shift from an American-dominated hegemonic world order to a bipolar or even multipolar world.
The second and perhaps more important concern is that the discussion that does exist among American news outlets is skewed. More often than not, the initiative is discussed only in a way that marginalizes the opposing perspective of it as imperialistic, power-hungry, or unstable. By simplifying the initiative into just another ideological power grab by the CCP, we are ignoring how the Initiative can be successful. While it istoo easy to view the Belt and Road as just another Chinese economic strategy, its effects and future implications for Chinese policy, culture, and momentum are far too important to justify this paltry level of American interest.
This is not to say that the initiative is without flaws. The massive lending from the AIIB and Silk Road Fund has long-term costs for Chinese banks and poorer countries that often struggle to repay the loans. There is also the issue of sustainability, considering the necessity of funds to maintain growth, repair infrastructure and tackle socioeconomic challenges. But Belt and Road has taken on such a weight in current Chinese society precisely because it is seemingly unconstrained by the finances of its projects. That “Belt and Road” has been pitched for a Language Resources conference in Beijing, or is mounted high on bridges in rural China, testifies to the amount of cultural and social value it has acquired in contemporary China.
The Belt and Road’s Other Export: Chinese culture
My conversations with teachers, friends, government officials and professors in Beijing and Shanghai have clearly revealed that they have come to see Belt and Road less as a practical economic project than as a way of thinking. The initiative’s reach has extended far beyond infrastructure, economy, or tangible manifestations; the phrase “Belt and Road” has become ubiquitous in education, healthcare, and even entertainment.
The Belt and Road Forum for Language Resources advertised in Beijing hosted a series of speakers on how to package and export the Chinese education system. Researchers and professors of medicine at the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine have been discussing how to publish and market a standardized textbook of Chinese Medicine to the international stage along this same belt and road. For Chinese citizens, the initiative has come to encompass far more than the tangible pipelines, tunnels, and railways being built across Central Asia and the Middle East. It has become a framework through which they understand this new age of globalization and internationalism, and China’s role in it.
Putting this sentiment in a historical context helps illuminate what makes the Belt and Road so significant to the Chinese people. To reference the Silk Road harkens back to when China was at the center of its economic, cultural, and political spheres, setting the standard for modernity and progress. In a way, the initiative is an invitation to recapture the legitimacy to claim that the Chinese form of governance, civil society, and development is successful. It is to offer what has been called the Beijing Consensus: a model for developing countries that poses an alternative to the Washington Consensus of neoliberal market-friendly policies.
Compared to pure trade agreements or bureaucratic political agendas, the Belt and Road is accessible to the popular imagination in China. The image of a pathway sweeping from China out to the rest of the world symbolically appeals to the Chinese public. Critics often mention that China’s soft power may be unsustainable because it is produced by elites and the political Party, rather than by the populace. The ground-level cultural impact of Belt and Road stands as a challenge to that: China’s cultural export wave is on the rise, and the rest of the world would be remiss to overlook it.
