What is the Belt and Road Initiative really?

IN APRIL of this year, the United States, seemingly no longer content to uphold the status quo of global trade and power, unleashed a barrage of tariffs against every single country in the world. The new policies set a baseline tariff of 10 percent on all goods coming into the United States, with some countries (along with uninhabited territories) facing even higher tariff rates. Though US president Donald Trump temporarily put most of these tariffs on halt after days of precipitous stock-index drops and ominous bond-market rumblings, the damage was done: It was lost on no one that the United States had effectively threatened to end the global free-trade regime it had played a leading role in establishing, fostering and defending for decades.

It is no exaggeration to say that globalisation is, and has been for some time now, at the precipice. While the US tariffs were the latest salvo against an established international consensus, they were hardly the first. The supply-chain aftershocks of the Covid-19 pandemic – fluctuating gas prices, shipping delays, vicious inflation – laid bare the fragility of a system in which a single cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal could bring much of global trade to a halt, as happened in March 2021. In democratic elections in 2024, in country after country, incumbent parties either lost or saw significant drops in vote share, in no small part due to widespread anger over the economy.

The geopolitical shibboleths of the global free trade era are also crumbling. Globalisation’s apologists once argued that increased economic interdependence would deter wars, given that no aggressor country would risk the cost of disrupting its place in the global market. But tightly interconnected transnational financial networks have not been enough to deter Russia from marching into Ukraine, nor China from militarising its coast guard to assert disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Small wonder, then, that China has been increasingly emboldened to view the present moment as an opportunity to shift, if not entirely supplant, this besieged global order in its own favour. Gone are the days when Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader throughout most of the 1980s, urged his country to “hide your strength and bide your time” on the international stage. In 2013, China’s current paramount leader, Xi Jinping, announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a decades-long undertaking to invest trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects across the world – and, in doing so, to reshape the ideological realities underpinning the international order.

Since the BRI’s formal announcement, China has invested over USD 1 trillion across some 150 countries, according to the US think tank Council of Foreign Relations. The BRI has built deep-water ports in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Peru, Nigeria and Cameroon; railroads in Laos, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti; and the entire business district of Egypt’s new capital city. If the initiative continues until 2049, its planned completion date, the BRI could eventually contribute USD 7 trillion to world GDP per annum and lift 32 million people out of moderate poverty, as per an estimate from the London-based think tank Centre for Economics and Business Research.

Yet exactly what the BRI is remains unclear. Many landmark Chinese infrastructure projects, such as the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and the China–Europe Railway Express, predate 2013 and were only retroactively incorporated into the BRI. At the same time, quantifying the BRI’s true impact is like trying to track the score in a game where the rules keep changing, as China does not publish an official list of BRI projects or participating countries; BRI investments come from a variety of sources, including wholly state-owned enterprises like the Export-Import Bank of China (also known as Eximbank) and ostensibly private companies like Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, a major Chinese manufacturer and mining firm, muddying the waters of exactly how and how much capital is deployed.

What the Belt and Road Initiative represents on the global stage remains equally amorphous. Depending on whom you ask, the BRI is a 21st-century Marshall Plan for the Global South, a series of crippling debt traps, or a herald of China’s new role as the dominant global superpower. Perhaps Jonathan E Hillman, a close China watcher and former US government adviser, put it best in The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century (2020): “As in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, observers have struggled to describe the BRI because they have latched onto different parts of this beast.”

SIMON CURTIS and Ian Klaus’s The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order finds its own way of latching on to the beast. Instead of measuring the BRI through renminbi outflows, GDP growth or poverty reduction rates, Curtis and Klaus analyse the sweep of the BRI on the granular level of the city. Though “cities and urban forms are often considered topics, and areas of expertise, apart from that of diplomacy, foreign policy, and geopolitics,” they argue, “the materiality of the urban landscape and its infrastructures is an indispensable carrier, and repository, of power.”

The BRI, which aims to build out trade corridors crisscrossing Eurasia, the Pacific and beyond, will inevitably give rise to new cities and breathe life into existing ones. Curtis and Klaus point to how, for instance, the construction of a railway connecting China to central Asia has transformed Khorgos, a once-modest city straddling the Chinese–Kazakh border, into the largest dry port in the world.

Beyond mere infrastructure development, Curtis and Klaus posit that the Belt and Road City represents a promising break from the prevailing global order. “Belt and Road Cities could, in theory, offer a more balanced and equitable form of urbanism than did the destructive excesses of the Global Cities of the past four decades of unbridled market liberalism,” the authors write.

This prediction points to the central question of The Belt and Road City: To what extent will the Belt and Road City, and the BRI writ large, meaningfully differ from Western-sponsored schemes of development, trade and global interconnectedness?

Curtis and Klaus view the kind of foreign expansion China is now engaged in as a rite of passage for any rising superpower. Like the United States, which maintains military bases around the globe, and Britain, which laid railroad tracks across Southasia during its colonial rule, China is no stranger to the idea that infrastructure often doubles as a symbol and tool of empire-building.

But the book’s case studies of BRI cities such as Cape Coast in Ghana or Sihanoukville in Cambodia reveal less about China’s unique vision and more about the local idiosyncrasies of foreign development. Curtis and Klaus describe, for instance, how Cape Coast’s famed Kotokuraba Market was renovated in 2012 with a loan of over USD 30 million from China Eximbank. The funding came with the stipulation that a Chinese firm design the new space, and the end result raised rents while squeezing the size of vendors’ stalls. “Make no mistake,” the authors declare, “the market is different because of Chinese intervention.” Perhaps – but all interventions produce change, and Kotokuraba Market would have been different regardless of whether its renovation had been bankrolled by the United States or the People’s Republic of China.

More ambitiously, The Belt and Road City argues there is more to the BRI than the fact that a different superpower is now signing the same foreign aid cheques. Curtis and Klaus take it that the Chinese genuinely seek to “mold material and urban life in ways that reflect their interests and values.”

This is not a new argument. Since the earliest incarnations of the modern city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, urban forms have been used as levers with which to shape the wider world. The German sociologist Georg Simmel, in his seminal 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, wrote that “it is the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or international area … The most significant characteristic of the metropolis is this functional extension beyond its physical boundaries.”

The German cities Simmel described, with their “rapid crowding of changing images” and “the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance,” were inextricably Western cities, shaped by Western ideas and shortcomings alike. The cities that have appeared since have continued in this lineage: they have facilitated neoliberal market economies, played host to the liberal intelligentsia, and segregated residents by means of the redline, the banlieue or the slum.

To gaze down at Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour and see cargo ships trailing off into the South China Sea, or to deposit a wad of US dollars at a Western Union depot in Queens and have a stack of rupees reach Delhi in a matter of days, is to witness the primacy of a system where capital seemingly effortlessly transcends borders. At the same time, the undocumented migrants palling around Los Angeles’s strip malls to search for under-the-table jobs, or the foreign labourers who toil in abusive conditions in the Gulf, speak to a different reality: the rough edges of a system which has long prioritised the free and secure movement of goods, not people, across continents.

Whether the Chinese city can modify or replace this vision of the globalised metropolis depends largely on whether China is able to develop a coherent and alternative value system. The Western or Western-inspired city exists as a result of specific political articulations. These include the Westphalian system, which established the concept of territorial state sovereignty, and the idea of human rights, which (however imperfectly) guarantees each individual minimum inalienable rights. What does China have to offer in place of these?

The Belt and Road City proposes that China’s worldview may be found in the doctrine of tianxia – “everything under heaven” – which Curtis and Klaus argue has reemerged to guide Xi’s thinking today. Tianxia, originally espoused in dynastic China, presents geopolitical primacy not in Kissingerian realist terms of “might makes right”, but rather in normative terms, such that a central state possessing “cosmic wisdom” can bind “others to it in an evolving community of common destiny.”

Aside from the fact that this theory tends to clumsily paint China as an alien Other – “the Confucian understanding of social relations as a co-evolving web of reciprocal obligations relies on the Chinese concepts of guanxi and gong sheng,” Curtis and Klaus write at one point – it is doubtful whether tianxia has made much of an impact on Chinese grand strategy.

Consider China’s “Wolf Warrior” foreign policy, so christened after a jingoistic 2015 film of the same name that came to prominence during the pandemic. With the tacit encouragement of Beijing, Wolf Warrior diplomats took to defending China at all costs, even if it meant directing childish insults at Western nations and officials on social media. While Western officials preached the necessity of upholding human rights, their Chinese counterparts admonished the “many ‘mad hyenas’ … who furiously attack China”, in the words of China’s ambassador to France at the time – hardly a cosmically wise vision for a new world order.

As it turned out, Wolf Warrior diplomacy had a limited shelf life. Once it became apparent that the approach was only stoking anti-Chinese sentiment, it was quietly retired. More recently, China has experimented with more conciliatory approaches to the rest of the world. Yet it is Wolf Warrior diplomacy rather than tianxia that arguably exemplifies Chinese foreign policy. It is reactionary before visionary; defensive before expansionist; piecemeal before systematic.

How exactly China’s strategy might reshape the global city remains an open question. Curtis and Klaus acknowledge that “there will likely never be a singular urban form associated with the BRI cities. Global and regional development, whether American-led or Chinese-led, is never as successful as its critics maintain at melting away local nuances and histories.”

Yet for all their variations, today’s global cities – places shaped by the post-Second World War international consensus, the rise of free-floating currency markets in the 1970s, and an insatiable need for cheap, round-the-clock labour – are unquestionably instances of the Western capitalist project rendered, quite literally, concrete. The Belt and Road City, on the other hand, remains tantalisingly out of reach and beyond the imagination.

THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS was not built in a day, and the Beijing Consensus will not be built in a day either. Yet China does not have a free hand to experiment with the world order as it sees fit. As Curtis and Klaus point out, unlike the circumstances in which the United States or Britain became ascendent, the international order that China seeks to reorganise is one in which the rules of engagement have been dictated by, and prejudiced in favour of, rival nations.

Time is also running out for China to find its footing. Since the heady days of 2013, much of the enthusiasm around the BRI has waned. One major sign of trouble came in Sri Lanka, when a Chinese-financed infrastructure spree, including a deep-water port at Hambantota, contributed to plunging the country into unsustainable debt. In 2018, the Sri Lankan government agreed to hand control of the Hambantota port over to China for 99 years, but it was not enough to staunch the haemorrhaging. By 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt, becoming the first Asian country to do so in over two decades. Since then, Sri Lanka has been joined by the likes of Pakistan, Laos and Montenegro, all of which have experienced debt issues related to BRI projects. In fact, over 80 percent of Chinese loans have gone to countries in debt distress, opening the door for Beijing to capitalise by extracting geopolitical concessions.

Some accounts describe China’s practices as intentional “debt trap diplomacy”, yet the underlying intent may be more prosaic. By some measures, China’s financial industry – though ostensibly under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party – still resembles a Wild West of poor risk-management and freewheeling investments. (Case in point: Last year, the Chinese government warned bankers to quit playing a popular group card game because workers were carrying out business relationships with their card buddies instead of conducting proper due diligence.) By extension, the debt traps laid by the largely decentralised BRI may simply be a product of shoddy implementation.

Another guiding impetus behind the BRI may come from China’s need to extricate itself from the middle-income trap, a point that The Belt and Road City reiterates. Having grown its economy one “Made in China” tag at a time, Beijing now seeks to pivot towards a high-tech knowledge economy that will allow it to catch up to developed Western nations. Offshoring its manufacturing to BRI countries would be a natural step on the way out of the middle-income trap – if not for the fact that China also tends to send its own workers overseas to work on BRI projects in lieu of employing local labourers in host countries.

Chinese migrant workers are, to put it mildly, not always a welcome presence overseas. In Pakistan’s Balochistan province, home to both entrenched regional separatist groups and the Chinese-financed Gwadar Port, Chinese labourers have been targeted and killed by Baloch militants, forcing China to deploy security forces to Pakistan. Even in countries nominally aligned with Chinese interests, such as Russia and Kazakhstan, an influx of Chinese workers has led to resentment and anti-Chinese protests.

In light of all this, Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, may serve as a more sobering example of the Belt and Road City. After the Solomon Islands gained independence in 1978, and given the archipelago nation’s strategic location in the southern Pacific Ocean, both China and Taiwan deployed considerable investments to woo local politicians to their side. The resulting influx of entrepreneurs had the opposite effect. In 2006, amid allegations that either China or Taiwan had bribed Solomon Islander parliamentarians to elect an unpopular prime minister, anti-Chinese riots left 60 Chinese-owned businesses razed in Honiara’s Chinatown. In 2021, another round of riots and looting – this time over the Solomon Islands’ decision to break diplomatic ties with Taiwan and recognise the People’s Republic of China – left four dead in Chinatown.

And yet, two years after the riots and just a few kilometres away from the torched Chinese businesses, the Solomon Islands government inaugurated a national sports stadium paid for with a gift of roughly USD 71 million from the People’s Republic of China. The governments of the Solomon Islands and China have also since inked a security arrangement that Western officials worry will eventually pave the way for China to build a military base on the islands’ territory. If there is any conclusion to be drawn about the Belt and Road City, it may be this: The BRI, far from rising above the uncertainties of the West-led global order, will simply offer its own set of ambiguities.

CURTIS AND KLAUS are most prescient when they concede that it is simply too early to tell what China will become if it reaches primacy on the global stage. “It remains possible,” they acknowledge, “that for all its size, and growing strength and influence, China’s increasingly ambitious reach may exceed its grasp.”

By 2049, the Belt and Road Initiative may accomplish all it set out to do and more, allowing “nations of different races, faiths, and cultures [to] collectively contribute to peace and prosperity,” as Xi predicted in 2013. Or the BRI may collapse, done in by the weight of bureaucratic incompetence and geopolitical headwinds. The cities of the future may feature the looming skyscrapers of Shanghai or Shenzhen, or they may reveal the contradictions confined in the space between Honiara’s Chinatown and sports stadium.

“The materiality of the urban landscape,” Curtis and Klaus write, “allows empires and powerful states to project and instantiate their own values and preferences about how to order society and civilization.” Those urban landscapes remain few and far between. Until they materialise, we are left with our own cities, our own values, and our own realities to contend with for now.

The article appeared in himalmag