China’s Belt and Road Initiative (“BRI”) was a brilliant concept: China would go to cash-strapped countries around the world and offer to build infrastructure for them. It would loan them funds for the projects, provided that the countries looked to China for both labor and materials. This would give China a military and economic foothold in these countries, provide labor for the Chinese people, and send money back to China. However, the BRI is proving to be more problematic than China imagined. This doesn’t mean that China hasn’t expanded its sphere of influence, but the BRI is not making China the global behemoth it envisioned.

Xi Jinping unveiled the BRI a decade ago. Wikipedia’s summary is adequate (hyperlinks and endnotes omitted):

The stated objectives are “to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, resulting in an innovative pattern of capital inflows, talent pools, and technology databases.” The Belt and Road Initiative addresses an “infrastructure gap” and thus has the potential to accelerate economic growth across the Asia Pacific, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe.

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The initial focus has been infrastructure investment, education, construction materials, railway and highway, automobile, real estate, power grid, and iron and steel. Already, some estimates list the Belt and Road Initiative as one of the largest infrastructure and investment projects in history, covering more than 68 countries, including 65% of the world’s population and 40% of the global gross domestic product as of 2017.

China’s reach has been impressive, but there is such a thing as overextending oneself. Also, when China brings its infrastructure abroad, it also brings with it problems inherent in its domestic infrastructure. One of these is the fact that, despite being a global player, China continues in many ways to be an insular culture. While America may have gone overboard with cultural sensitivities, China hasn’t even gotten on board.

Image: Chinese map of the Belt and Road Initiative near China by 未来智者. CC BY-SA 4.0.

An example is that China has failed to make inroads into East Africa. Writing at The Diplomat in 2022, David Skidmore said,

As China draws back from large scale infrastructure investments in Africa, it is worth considering why so many major Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in the region, unveiled with great fanfare, have ultimately struggled. A connecting thread across such cases has been China’s inability to manage the political complexities associated with infrastructure development.

Within China itself, the context for infrastructure development is defined by political continuity, deep-pocketed state actors, state-controlled media, and a weak civil society. Authorities can plan and implement projects with few serious impediments.

The BRI was envisioned as an extension of this top-down “China Model” of infrastructure development to other countries. But, of course, the political circumstances familiar to Chinese actors at home are seldom duplicated abroad….

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Chinese actors typically approach BRI deals with two contradictory assumptions: First, the political leadership with whom they are dealing is either too weak or too venal to challenge contract terms that decidedly favor China; and, second, these same leaders will be strong enough to fend off resistance to ambitious infrastructure projects by opposition politicians and civil society groups while also mobilizing the financial resources necessary to sustain expensive, long term projects.

Another problem plaguing Chinese projects is that, unless it’s having thousands of people perform in unison for military parades or Olympic spectacles, the Chinese do lousy, slipshod work, as the WSJ wrote last year:

Today, thousands of cracks have emerged in the $2.7 billion Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, government engineers said, raising concerns that Ecuador’s biggest source of power could break down. At the same time, the Coca River’s mountainous slopes are eroding, threatening to damage the dam.

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It is one of many Chinese-financed projects around the world plagued with construction flaws.

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… China’s lending practices have been criticized by foreign leaders, economists and others, who say the program has contributed to debt crises in places like Sri Lanka and Zambia, and that many countries have limited ways to repay the loans. Some projects have also been called mismatches for a country’s infrastructure needs or damaging to the environment.

Now, low-quality construction on some of the projects risks crippling key infrastructure and saddling nations with even more costs for years to come as they try to remedy problems.

Taking these issues into consideration, it’s not surprising to read the Epoch Times’s massive, deep-dive report explaining that China’s BRI, which has cost it $1 trillion so far, just isn’t working. Corruption, failure to understand local issues, construction failures, and many nations’ uneasy feeling that they’re being made into cogs in China’s massive military infrastructure are seeing them start to pull out, as both Italy and the Philippines have recently done.

None of this means that China or its BRI is a spent force. It does mean, though, that Xi doesn’t necessarily have the Midas touch and that China is vulnerable. And while I don’t wish the Chinese people ill, I certainly do not want a world in which China, a totalitarian nation that views America’s downfall as necessary to its ascension, is the most powerful country in the world.