Building a better world
China’s BRI helps advance the goal of a more equitable and balanced international order
Essentially, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) comprises a set of bilateral and multilateral deals between China and other countries designed to increase connectivity, trade, investment, people-to-people relations, financial integration, policy coordination and industrial development.
According to official data, China’s non-financial direct investment in Belt and Road countries has risen almost constantly despite the economic turbulence of the past few years, from $14.83 billion in 2015 to $20.97 billion in 2022. The value of new foreign construction projects increased from $92.64 billion in 2015 to $154.9 billion in 2019. In 2022, the figure was $129.6 billion despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
The BRI is a multilevel infrastructure framework centered on energy and power, railways, roads, shipping, aviation, pipelines, cross-border fiber optic cables and integrated space information networks designed to reduce transport and transaction costs and share information, along with economic development zones, energy, water and social infrastructure. Initially embracing Asia, Europe and Africa, it has been extended to the Pacific and Latin America, and is aimed at peaceful economic cooperation and development.
A striking example of this is the China-Europe Railway Express. From 2011 to 2022, trains completed over 65,000 trips and shipped freight worth $300 billion. A network of 82 service lines traverses Eurasia connecting over 200 cities. In China there are five gateways/ ports including Horgos and Alashankou Port in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Manzhouli and Erenhot
Port in the Inner
Mongolia autonomous region, and Suifenhe in Heilongjiang.
The goal is to drive development with an increasing emphasis on projects that are high-quality, equitable and green.
From the outset, the BRI has been centered on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for each country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the diversity of civilizations, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in a country’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit (win-win cooperation and fairness and justice), and peaceful coexistence.
On its launch, President Xi pointed out that the historical Silk Roads had shown that “countries of different races, beliefs and cultural backgrounds are fully capable of sharing peace and development”. More recently the BRI has assumed a role in China’s aim to help construct a global community with a shared future for mankind.
In fact, the BRI is one of a number of striking Chinese initiatives whose goal is to address global issues. In 2017, Xi said that the initiative is a Chinese contribution to answer two questions: what is wrong with the world and what should we do?
What is wrong is the existence of three deficits: a peace deficit, a development deficit and a global governance deficit. The last includes the need to rescue the United Nations Charter whose first two articles call for the maintenance of international peace and security and the sovereign equality of all members. The governance deficit also involves the need to act collectively to deal with conflict, security, development differentials, refugee movements, climate change, the environmental and biodiversity crises and health issues.
China has also pointed to a security deficit and the importance of the principle of indivisible security.
The BRI and the subsequent initiatives reflect distinctive values and principles deriving from several sources. Alongside the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, distinct Chinese civilizational values and hybrid Chinese characteristics resulting from its international engagement have led to a distinct Asian vision of an international order that Western civilization finds it difficult to understand.
In the past (until 1894), the East Asian world system (setting aside Western interventions) was much more peaceful than Western civilization. Chinese thought draws on a traditional distinction between a king who rules by benevolence and righteousness and a hegemon who rules by power. Chinese civilization rejects the principle of hegemony.
China’s vision is a harmonious international order rooted in Chinese concepts of “all under heaven”, relationality and symbiosis. In this light, the BRI can be described as a vision of the world in which the success of one country can only be guaranteed by the success of all. The BRI is a success only if all its member states develop and prosper in tandem.
This vision of a more equitable and harmonious multipolar world is reflected not just in the BRI but also in other Chinese initiatives: the Global Development Initiative to help “other developing countries to pursue the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, jointly address “global humanitarian challenges” and support “endogenous growth”; and the Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative; as well as the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind.
In short, while watching the progress of concrete BRI projects and the new financial and governance architecture associated with them, one should always keep in mind the way the initiative seeks to contribute to the development of a more equitable and democratic global order that has no need for a global Leviathan.