Lessons From Belt and Road
The world should utilize the opportunity to benefit from China’s experience
SThe author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London ince 1978, the People’s Republic of China broadly embarked on an era—which came to be known as reform and opening up—where it observed and tried to learn from the world around it. Many different ideas were imported into the country throughout this process. Chinese politicians, academics, business people and others spread across the world engaging in what could be called a “great learning” period, bringing back legal ideas from Japan and Germany and technological processes from the U.S. and Europe.
Proven results
This has led to two outcomes. First, the most obvious and celebrated is the economic growth that the importation of new ideas and processes brought to China. With a per-capita GDP of only a few hundred dollars in the late 1970s, today Chinese people enjoy a per-capita GDP of around $10,000, putting their country in the middle income bracket worldwide.
This period lifted many hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, leading to an economy that is now a major source of growth for the rest of the world.
However, because of the unique features of its society, culture and economic composition, China also transformed the ideas it took in. It created a new kind of development model, which has been much commented on and studied by the rest of the world. While there are a number of different interpretations of the China model, the fact that China has learned many things from its developmental path over the last four decades and is now in a position to share them with the rest of the world, is indisputable. It is safe to say that we are living in an era in which this process is taking place. China the learner is now increasingly in a position to be China the teacher.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has been one vehicle by which China has tried in the past few years to undertake this transformation from pupil to teacher. As a country that has successfully built perhaps more logistic infrastructure than any other in the history of humanity, China certainly has the ability now to convey lessons on this to others. So for all the criticism of the AIIB when it was first launched by the Chinese Government in 2014, its principle of sharing China’s unique understanding and practice of development, and offering it to others to use, is irrefutable.
Sharing the wealth
The Belt and Road Initiative is the second, larger iteration of China’s decades-long process. Its focus on the connectivity of logistics, information technology, people-to-people links and finance has been offered as a broad framework by which others in the region and further afield can engage in a “great learning” similar to that which China embarked on in the late 1970s.
Of course, this is simply one interpretation of the initiative. Others have seen it in much cruder geopolitical terms. But the openness and ambition of the Belt and Road concept meant that it was never going to be easily pushed into one single interpretative framework. It needs to be considered from a number of different angles. Even the Chinese Government has clearly shown space for flexibility and sometimes a change of tactics or focus in what the initiative is intended to do and how it does it. In that sense, widespread consultations have been ongoing since the idea was first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, which will continue. The Belt and Road Initiative was never meant to be a process of prescription and enforcement, despite criticisms from some. It has been more about setting out a broad parameter which can then be used to try to convey to others some of the things that China has learnt about development.
The initiative, as a pedagogical model, reduces some of the anxiety about what is assumed to be the ambition and intention at its heart. It is not about enforcing one set notion of a China model. That at least is now clear. There are, instead, China models, and a set of ideas that can be drawn from China’s developmental experience to other diverse environments. This is the most positive approach to the Belt and Road Initiative. It reverses some of the earlier asymmetry of the past few decades, where China was always in the position of learning, while what is broadly called the West (Europe, the U.S., Australia and some Asian developed economies) always seemed to be teaching. Now at least we have all become teachers and students. However, seeing China as a teaching power has proven challenging to some,