China’s global building spree runs into trouble

LAHORE, Pakistan. — Pakistan’s first metro, the Orange Line, was meant to be an early triumph in China’s quest to supplant US influence here and redraw the world’s geopolitical map.

Financed and built by Chinese state-run companies, the soon-to-be-finished overhead railway through Lahore is among the first projects in China’s $62 billion plan for Pakistan. Beijing hoped the $2 billion air-conditioned metro, sweeping past crumbling relics of Mughal and British imperial rule, would help make Pakistan a showcase for its global infrastructure-building spree.

Instead, it has become emblematic of the troubles that are throwing China’s modern-day Silk Road initiative off course. Three years into China’s programme here, Pakistan is heading for a debt crisis, caused in part by a surge in Chinese loans and imports for projects like the Orange Line, which Pakistani officials say will require public subsidies to operate.

China’s global plan, called the “Belt and Road Initiative,” involves some 70 countries and has been likened to the US Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. By building a network of ports, railways, roads and pipelines, China aims to open new East-West trade routes, generate business for Chinese companies and expand its strategic influence.

While the Americans mainly used grants in Postwar Europe, China has mostly extended loans in opaque deals often contingent on using Chinese contractors. Pakistan is now one of several countries grappling with the financial and political fallout of taking on so much Chinese debt. With a general election in Pakistan scheduled for July 25, an ascendant opposition is pledging to publish secret details about the financing of Chinese projects, including the Orange Line, and Pakistani industry is agitating for less-generous perks for Chinese companies.

Pakistani authorities have fallen behind on payments for electricity from new Chinese power projects — the bulk of the infrastructure program — because of longstanding problems getting Pakistanis to pay their bills, according to a senior Pakistani official.

The problems are expected come to a head by early fall, when Pakistan’s new government is likely to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, the nation’s first since 2013, according to Pakistani officials. Such a bailout would likely include restrictions on borrowing and spending, the officials say, which would force the country to curtail its Belt and Road program with China, known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC.

That would be a big embarrassment for China, which has portrayed its plan as a game-changer for this chronically unstable nation of 200 million — and a chance to prove the benefits of its development model to other nations.

“You’re then effectively having the West bail out this country,” says Andrew Small, an expert on China-Pakistan relations at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington think tank. “If this is where Pakistan ends up financially, I think that’s going to be a big kind of black mark against the entire Belt and Road.” It also would give the US, the largest contributor to the IMF, a strong influence over China’s plans in Pakistan. Washington has been pushing back against what US officials have called Beijing’s “debttrap diplomacy”.

European Union and Indian officials also have stepped up criticism of Belt and Road, saying it lacks transparency and sustainability and is designed to expand China’s strategic influence.

“The Ming Dynasty appears to be their model, albeit in a more muscular manner, demanding other nations become tribute states, kowtowing to Beijing,” US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said in June. Chinese President Xi Jinping rejects such criticism, telling a conference in April his infrastructure programme was neither a Chinese conspiracy nor a would-be Marshall Plan, but an attempt to build a “community of shared future”. China’s foreign ministry said in a written statement to The Wall Street Journal that its Pakistan program remained a model for Belt and Road countries. “Naturally, it will have to adapt to changing conditions, and necessary adjustments will be carried out,” it said, adding that China was in close contact with Pakistan on its financial situation. In Malaysia, the second-biggest recipient of Belt and Road loans after Pakistan, a new government suspended work this month on a $20 billion Chinese railway project and is reviewing other Chinese projects. Myanmar is trying to renegotiate a $10 billion Chinese port project. Nepal has halted plans for two Chinese-built hydroelectric dams since November.

Chinese projects in Pakistan now vulnerable to chopping include an $8 billion railway upgrade central to Beijing’s vision of a new overland trade route, which would link China’s northwest to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, Pakistani officials say. The upgrade aimed to double the average speed on 1,170 miles of track between the port of Karachi and the northern city of Peshawar.

“I can’t see how the money would be repaid” for the upgrade, says one senior Pakistani official involved in discussions with China.

The IMF also would likely require Pakistan’s new government to be more transparent about existing CPEC projects. Critics of the outgoing government accused it of channelling funds to wasteful political projects, often in opaque deals, without competitive bidding.“Deals like the Orange Line cannot be secret,” says Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, spokesman for the main opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. He says his party backed CPEC but wanted all agreements put before the parliament for review. Pakistan’s outgoing government blames its debt crisis on an overvalued rupee, and it questions Western motives in criticising Chinese loans. “Before China came along, they weren’t worried about Third World debt,” says Miftah Ismail, the departing finance minister.

The US helped build Pakistan’s infrastructure in the 1950s and 60s, when it saw the country as a Cold War ally. More recently, Washington focused on other economic aid and security assistance to fight groups such as the Taliban. With the Beijing and Islamabad say that of 43 CPEC projects due to be finished by 2030, around half — worth $19 billion — are completed or under way, including a dozen power plants.

Much of the infrastructure is badly needed, especially the energy projects, which will help ease Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages. Even so, some ministers in the outgoing government said in interviews they should have negotiated better terms with China, and been more open about details. Official figures reviewed by the Journal show that Chinese-backed power plants were promised annual returns on investment of up to 34 percent, guaranteed by Pakistan’s government, in dollars, for 30 years. — Wall Street Journal.