The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
China’s growing sphere of influence
It has been called China’s version of the Marshall Plan: a $1 trillion complex of infrastructure investment and aid stretching from Kyrgyzstan to Central Europe, with extensions to Southeast Asia, Africa and even Latin America.
President Xi Jinping, who touted the “belt and road” initiative at a heavily orchestrated two-day summit that concluded in Beijing on Monday, clearly hopes the geopolitical effects will be analogous. China would consolidate a sphere of influence across Eurasia and make itself a superpower with global influence rivaling, if not exceeding, that of the United States.
It’s possible that this scheme will realize what Xi calls “the China dream”; it can be hoped that it will, at least, provide badly needed rail lines, ports and power plants to poor countries such as Pakistan, Laos, Burma and Indonesia, where work is already underway. Those who worry about a Chinese juggernaut, however, may be comforted by the fact that the top-down, autocratic nature of the belt and road plan and China’s self-interested structuring of the projects mean that it is likely to fall short of its aims.
In short, Xi’s Marshall Plan is likely to be hamstrung precisely by its differences from the Marshall Plan, which channeled U.S. aid to allied European democracies rebuilding after World War II. There is nothing democratic or transparent about the Chinese initiative.
Deals for infrastructure investment are being struck by Chinese companies with elites, some of whom may pocket some of the proceeds even as China gains new means to export its goods or, in the case of ports such as Gwadar in Pakistan, potentially refuel its navy. Some deals, such as the building of a port in Sri Lanka, have already triggered a political backlash.
The $124 billion Xi pledged to invest on Sunday will help Chinese steel and cement firms struggling with overcapacity. Chinese construction firms will gain business, and tens of thousands of Chinese workers may travel abroad to do much of the work. Most of the money will come in the form of loans from Chinese banks, meaning that poor countries such as Laos and Kenya, where China is completing a railroad, may struggle under the resulting debt burdens.
That’s not to say there will be no benefit for China’s neighbors. Pakistan, struggling with crippling power shortages, desperately needs the power plants China is building. Railroads in Southeast Asia and east Africa will provide means for Chinese imports, but also exports of commodities. Western companies, for their part, are hoping to get a piece of the action; envoys from the Trump administration and European Union countries spent their time at the summit lobbying for open procurement processes - something that could lower costs and corruption, if Beijing allows it.
Xi strikes a pose as a champion of free trade and investment; his propagandists describe belt and road as “globalization 2.0.” His neighbors, and Western businesses trying to compete in the Chinese market, know that’s not true. But President Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty, which would have bound the United States with 11 Pacific countries, means the United States now lacks an alternative to offer. If Xi succeeds in creating a Chinese sphere of influence, it will be on ground willingly ceded by Washington.