Belt and Road Read online

  It was always like that, as you will be told in Beijing. The difference is that now someone else is inching closer to the center. The Belt and Road is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart. In economic terms this means that China will be organizing and leading an increasing share of global supply chains, reserving for itself the most valuable segments of production and creating strong links of collaboration and infrastructure with other countries, whose main role in the system will be to occupy lower value segments. Politically, Beijing hopes to put in place the same kind of feedback mechanism that the West has benefited from: deeper links of investment, infrastructure and trade can be used as leverage to shape relations with other countries even more in its favor. The process feeds on itself. Until recently, it seemed that China’s growing influence would be contained to its own peripheries. That countries such as Greece and Hungary now openly defend Chinese positions during important meetings in Brussels has been a rude awakening.

  It is the case that the Belt and Road was from the outset defined as a radically new order. In this sense it owes some debt to Mao’s revolutionary legacy, as much as to Deng’s vision of a world organized as a network of production chains. A corpus of political literature surrounding the Belt and Road seeks to demonstrate that China will be a great power, entirely different from, and morally superior to, recent Western historical examples and that it will usher the whole world towards a new historical age. As the influential geopolitical thinker Wang Jisi notes, “That is a far cry from a global proletariat revolution, but it leaves room for selective opposition to the status quo.”21 In contrast with a West which is described as exploitative and aggressive, China is portrayed by Chinese scholars as inherently benevolent and peaceful. As we have seen already, the Belt and Road is meant to introduce a new theory of international relations that “resolutely rejects” power politics and is committed to settling disputes through dialogue rather than confrontation. These principles are a reformulation of Tianxia, often going so far as propounding old Confucian virtues of “sincerity,” “honesty” and “amity” as governing principles for world politics. The Western system of alliances, for example, is often described by Chinese authors as a “tiny circle of friends” leaving everyone else excluded. This language sounds foreign to Western ears, used since Machiavelli to exclude morality from foreign policy and often from domestic politics too. They are a reminder that it would be a mistake to think that China’s rise means that the country will occupy the center in a global system remaining essentially the same.

  It is true—we have seen it above—that there is a very long tradition of Chinese reflection on world affairs which is different from the Western one. The whole tradition of Tianxia differs from the tradition of political thought going back to the Greeks—the polis as a self-sufficient whole—and later Machiavelli, which is much more interested in questions of sovereignty and conflict. But to note this is not yet to settle the question of the validity of Tianxia as a way to think about world politics. It may transpire that, even though China does not intend the Belt and Road as a geopolitical project, as a project of state rivalry, it may ultimately function in this manner, against China’s wishes.

  In this book we shall be looking at some examples that indicate the usefulness of a geopolitical approach to the Belt and Road. Another possibility is to think this is all simply a grand deception, that the Chinese know very well that the initiative is about hegemony and power, but that they simply try to disguise the fact because—as Machiavelli teaches—your rise to power works better if you conceal it from everyone else. Significantly, this interpretation is now quite widespread in the public debate. President Xi felt forced to address it at the Boao Forum in April 2018, where he argued that “the Belt and Road is not a plot of China, but a plan in sunshine.” Was the denial also a part of the plot?

  The trope of a hidden geopolitical agenda has a long history in analyses of Chinese foreign policy. Most Western observers translate Deng’s famous phrase (“taoguang yanghui”) as “hiding capacities and biding time” or, in other words, building one’s capacities in darkness and waiting for the right moment to seek revenge. If the policy articulated by Deng was meant to reduce suspicion of Chinese intentions in other countries, its articulation produced the opposite effect. General Xiong Guangkai, former deputy chief of staff of the PLA, went so far as to write an article discussing how the English version had a negative impact on Chinese foreign policy and recommending alternative translations. It cannot be denied that the term, however translated, connotes trickery and conspiracy in traditional Chinese culture.22

  And yet the “paranoid style” applied to Chinese foreign policy omits most of what is new and interesting about the Belt and Road. Politics is to some extent always about deception, but to reduce the Belt and Road to a Machiavellian ruse is to overlook the larger forces explaining it and the rich consequences the initiative will have for the normative elements of world order. Already with the notion of a “harmonious world” introduced by President Hu Jintao in 2005, it was difficult or impossible to reduce its meaning simply to propaganda. It was an ideal concept—thus existing at some distance from everyday politics—but that did not mean it was not taken seriously and often firmly defended by public intellectuals and officials.

  The Chinese authorities are obviously right that a win-win solution is always possible in the sense that cooperation between two or more states can leave both better off. Where the model breaks down is at the level of different political concepts because these are always defined in opposition to one another. The ideological question—as opposed to the economic one—is inevitably zero-sum because to accept a certain way to organize social relations is to discard different concepts and principles. The fact is recognized by those Chinese scholars who have looked closely at the political implications of the new theory of Tianxia. Xu Jin and Guo Chu take a materialistic approach to the concept of a “community of shared destiny,” noting that in Chinese “fate” refers to the life fortunes of life and death, wealth and poverty. Just as in social life one cannot talk about fate without mentioning life and death, in international relations it is not possible to talk about fate without mentioning the happiness and misfortune of nations, their rise and fall, their security and prosperity. Like life and death, these are common to every nation, but the authors do not thereby conclude that the concept of fate is universal in a strict sense. The fate community, they argue, is a community promoted by China. It must reflect Chinese characteristics and highlight China’s role as the “master of fate.” Someone has to be in charge of making sure that things turn out well. “Each order or system reflects the characteristics and goals of its main advocates and promoters. Therefore in the cause of advocating and promoting the concept of fate community, China must be brave enough to work hard and be rewarded.”23

  Machiavellian politics is the wrong way to look at the Belt and Road, but even if one thinks in more traditional Chinese terms, that does not mean that they will be benign or acceptable to many parts of the world—including the West—because the traditional model is a model of dependency, one in which the center is in China, surrounded by different dependent peripheries—a model of Confucian society that is based on gratitude, and dependency, and respect for those that are more powerful. This is obviously antithetical to Western values. So even if China is eschewing a Machiavellian strategy in favour of some kind of Confucian strategy, applied to world politics, does this mean that everyone must welcome the revolution? What for China might be seen as the beginning of a new age in the history of mankind—predicated on relations of cooperation rather than conflict—will assume rather different hues elsewhere. This would be a system which many parts of the world, and above all the West, could not accept.

  In the past Tianxia took a specific legal and institutional form: the tributary system. Under this hierarchical order, foreign states, attracted by the splendor of Chinese civilization, voluntari
ly submitted to the Chinese court and became vassals, periodically sending embassies to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor. The system was a means of endowing the entire known world with a single political order. It was achieved by singling out a central state responsible for creating and maintaining order under the direct supervision of the highest deity, namely Heaven. Its ruler was the son of Heaven, whose authority alone could surpass territorial borders and bring the whole world together. Instead of territorial boundaries, relations between states were expressed by the aforementioned hierarchical relationship between the center, China, and the peripheries. The existence of fully independent states would have been contrary to the very idea of Tianxia.

  In court meetings, tributary envoys performed certain rituals including the full kowtow—kneeling three times, each time tapping their head to the ground for another three times, for a total of nine taps. The ambiguity of the system—its units were simultaneously part of a single order and left alone to govern their affairs—meant that ritual and symbol became more important than legal status. That element of Tianxia would in our time be represented by economic relations. Legally and politically, the states included in the Belt and Road would remain fully sovereign and independent. In practice, economic power would bind the system together and prevent it from falling apart. It is precisely in this informality that the initiative most obviously differs from the existing Western order which emphasizes legal and institutionalized procedures. The Belt and Road is not an entity with fixed rules; rather, it is deliberately intended to be informal, unstructured and opaque.

  An obvious fear for many participants and observers is that the Belt and Road will reintroduce the former hierarchy of the tributary system, even though nothing in the initiative is explicitly intended as a return to that model. Its antiquated rituals and formal procedures lie at the antipodes of the fast-changing and fast-moving China of our days, whose origins are in any case to be found in the fierce repudiation of the imperial system. But the Belt and Road is about interdependence. It aims to bring different states together in the realization of common projects. Because it is based on relations of dependence, it cannot but reproduce relations of power. Some states will be more dependent on China than China is on them.

  A moralized notion of international politics will mean that values such as loyalty, gratitude and friendship can easily translate into relations of dependency, especially in a situation where reprisals for charting an independent path are part of Chinese foreign policy. In December 2016, for example, China closed a key border-crossing with Mongolia a week after the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, visited the country. Hundreds of truck drivers for the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto were stuck at the Gants Mod crossing in south-eastern Mongolia in freezing temperatures. In response to the sanctions, the Mongolian government was forced to issue a number of ambiguous public statements, designed to be spun as a Dalai Lama ban, while letting Mongolia itself interpret it as a simple belief that local organizations would no longer invite him in the future.

  As China’s economy grows in strength, its overseas lending and investment as part of initiatives such as the Belt and Road will give it further potential for economic leverage. Once a project is under way, China may be able to defer loan disbursements or seek early repayment of loans as a coercive economic tool. After the completion of the project, a Chinese company operating a port might modestly slow transit to send a coercive signal about China’s control over a target country’s trade flows.24

  The idea of a “harmonious world” or a “community of shared destiny” may appeal to the pursuit of peace, cooperation and respect for cultural difference, but when—in a curious imitation of the Western concept of the end of history—it is presented as the inevitable endpoint of historical development, it becomes uncompromising and oppressive. Once a “community of shared destiny” has been advanced as the only correct option, the temptation is to start identifying disharmonious elements, those who, as the Chinese authorities like to put it, still harbor a Cold War mentality or a zero-sum approach to world politics. The implication is that the same Chinese elites who developed the concepts guiding the Belt and Road must now be left to decide how those concepts are to be executed. “If everyone behaves harmoniously, an end-state can be imagined where everyone complies with, or is co-opted by, the Chinese elite’s notion of what is an advanced culture and a ‘win-win’ solution: a harmonious world.”25 Participants in the Belt and Road are thus pushed to a position where only two options are possible: agreeing to its basic tenets and goals or declaring oneself on the wrong side of history.

  2

  NUTS AND BOLTS

  The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road were officially endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party soon after Xi’s speeches in Astana and Jakarta—first at the forum on China’s periphery diplomacy in October 2013, then by the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Central Committee in November. Work on delineating Xi’s vision in detail could start in earnest, but it was not until 2015 that the Belt and Road started to feature in the State Council’s reports on government work and in strategy and planning documents.

  In February 2015 a new Advancing the Development of the One Belt, One Road Leading Group was established. Its composition provided useful insight into the leadership’s concept of the initiative. Chairing the group was first-ranked Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, a member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee who held primary responsibility for finance, reform and development, and the environment. The group had four vice-chairmen: third-ranked Vice Premier Wang Yang, responsible for the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Yang Jiechi, a state councilor and former minister of foreign affairs, Yang Jing, secretary general of the State Council, and last but not least, Wang Huning, the philosopher-king behind Xi, arguably the intellectual creator of the Belt and Road, who was to be elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee in 2017. It is only in unusual circumstances, especially in times of foundings, crises and transitions, that political thinkers can come to exercise such authority. That Wang’s counsel has played a critical role since he was recruited by President Jiang Zemin in 1995 suggests there are profound questions confronting contemporary China that are not simply technical or bureaucratic.1

  On March 8, 2015 Foreign Minister Wang Yi dismissed comparisons of the initiative to the US-sponsored Marshall Plan. For one, the Belt and Road was meant to usher in a new model of international relations, not to salvage or reconstruct a crumbling European civilization. Second, it would be “the product of inclusive cooperation, not a tool of geopolitics, and must not be viewed with an outdated Cold War mentality,” Wang said, adding that China’s diplomacy in 2015 would focus on making progress on the Belt and Road. Building its own space and area of influence is the path to becoming a world power. China’s principal advantages are in the economic domain. Thus the Belt and Road is mainly about economic cooperation, including building factories, roads, bridges, ports, airports and other infrastructure as well as electric power grids, telecommunications networks, oil and natural gas pipelines and related projects.

  On March 28, 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Commerce—the authorship reflects the initiative’s double head, designed to stimulate and better integrate China’s domestic economy as well as enhance Beijing’s influence abroad—released the Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, the master plan setting forth guiding principles, main routes and projects, and areas of cooperation for the Belt and Road. In May 2015 Chinese media reported that there were over 900 major projects at the national level already in the pipeline, of which fifty would be launched soon and twenty related to the Maritime Silk Road. The initiative also featured in China’s 13th five-year plan, which outlines the country’s key priorities for 2016–20 and dedicates a chapter to the aim of moving forward with the Belt and Road.

  Finally, in October 2017 t
he Belt and Road was included in the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution, an entirely unprecedented honor for a foreign policy or infrastructure initiative, ensuring that it will become a core principle, impossible to abandon—and likely to impose on foreign states a corresponding obligation to engage with the Belt and Road if they want to engage with China. Direct attacks on the constitutional principles of other countries are, after all, hardly compatible with diplomatic practice.

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  The Vision and Actions document describes the initiative “to jointly build the Belt and Road” as “aimed at promoting orderly and free flow of economic factors, highly efficient allocation of resources and deep integration of markets.” Simultaneously, it encourages “the countries along the Belt and Road to achieve economic policy coordination and carry out broader and more in-depth regional cooperation of higher standards.” Already in this initial programmatic statement the roles of market and state appear combined. Interestingly, the same dual nature is revealed in the maps of the initiative released at about the same time by Xinhua and other Chinese media outlets. The metropolitan dots connected by lines—market integration—are inscribed not against a plain white background, but typically by superimposing that illustration of market networks on a standard map of national territories. Visually, as a shrewd paper by the scholars Nordin and Weissmann puts it, “the two imaginaries clearly coexist.”2

  The initiative will abide by market rules and international norms, give play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation and the primary role of the private sector, while letting governments perform their due functions. The list of government functions is suitably vast and wide. Many of the countries included in the initiative are still developing and their economies need massive amounts of infrastructure investment, not easily undertaken by ordinary private enterprises. The Chinese model being exported along the routes of the Belt and Road is in any case one where the state retains control over sectors that are considered strategic, and oversees the way in which the Chinese economy relates to global markets. Governments “need to improve the region’s infrastructure, and put in place a secure and efficient network of land, sea and air passages, lifting their connectivity to a higher level; further enhance trade and investment facilitation, establish a network of free trade areas that meet high standards, maintain closer economic ties, and deepen political trust; enhance cultural exchanges; encourage different civilizations to learn from each other and flourish together; and promote mutual understanding, peace and friendship among people of all countries.” Internationalization of the kind advocated by the Belt and Road may have a synergetic relation with the preservation and growth of large state-owned enterprises which can engage in long-term investment abroad without being excessively concerned with the next quarter or with stock prices—and only under such favorable conditions ensure their own viability as world leaders. Revealingly, the launch of the Belt and Road was accompanied by a process of merger and acquisitions enabling the creation of truly massive industrial conglomerates. Some authors go so far as to claim that the Belt and Road “represents a grandiose reaffirmation of the Chinese commitment to state capitalism and its associated power relations.”3