by JAYATI GHOSH
Chinese President Xi Jinping (third from left) with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders during the Belt and Road Forum on May 15. PHOTO/Damir Sagolj/AP
China’s One Belt One Road project appears to have bought into several features of neoliberal globalisation, including deeper financial integration, protection of various kinds for private investors through “investment facilitation” and very extensive trade liberalisation.
IT is a truism of history that rising powers tend to be the ones valorising “free” trade and more open and integrated national economies, just as waning powers tend to turn inwards. So, it is no surprise that over the past half year, as the United States elected a President with an avowedly protectionist agenda (even if relatively little has been acted upon so far), China’s President has become the chief advocate of globalisation and more extensive trade and investment links across countries.
This drumbeat reached a crescendo in mid-May, at a summit in Beijing to celebrate the official launch of the major new Chinese initiative, the One Belt One Road (OBOR) project, which President Xi Jinping himself described as “the project of the century”.
The plan, which has been talked of since 2013, is grandiose and overwhelmingly ambitious. Harking back to the “Silk Route” that was established two millennia earlier and became the primary trading route linking the Chinese empire with other civilisations of the time, it aims to connect more than 60 countries with around two-thirds of the world’s population. This would be done through infrastructure establishing transport and other connectivity links, facilitating trade and investment and other forms of cooperation with China as the hub rather than just one end of the trail. The stated Chinese perception is that this will rebalance the global economy and restore faith in globalisation through new demand created by increasing supply, in a somewhat startling assertion of the much-discredited Say’s Law at a global level.
The official website declares: “The Belt and Road Initiative aims to promote the connectivity of Asian, European and African continents and their adjacent seas, establish and strengthen partnerships among the countries along the Belt and Road, set up all-dimensional, multitiered and composite connectivity networks, and realise diversified, independent, balanced and sustainable development in these countries. The connectivity projects of the Initiative will help align and coordinate the development strategies of the countries along the Belt and Road, tap market potential in this region, promote investment and consumption, create demands and job opportunities, enhance people-to-people and cultural exchanges and mutual learning among the peoples of the relevant countries, and enable them to understand, trust and respect each other and live in harmony, peace and prosperity.”
All this is obviously a huge and almost all-encompassing set of goals; but for now, in fact, the focus is essentially on infrastructure development. The initiative is confusingly named since the “Belt” refers to physical roads and overland transport while the “Road” actually refers to maritime routes. The Belt covers three main sets of connections seeking to link China to Russia and the Baltic European countries through Central Asia and Russia; going through Central Asia to connect China with West Asia, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean countries; and establishing seamless transport links between China and South-east Asia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean. The Road is being described as the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, which would develop the links of Chinese coastal ports to Europe through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean; and to the countries of the South Pacific Ocean through the South China Sea.
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