The Strait of Malacca (photo: Pixabay)
The BRI is the manifestation of China’s longstanding goal of ‘development’ in foreign policy under President Xi Jinping. Perhaps it was inspired by the need to find uses for excess basic industrial goods oversupply in the domestic Chinese economy, but it seeks to remedy a twentieth-century problem. Because of Sino-Soviet antipathy, difficult geography, and economic dysfunction, China has little infrastructure connection to Russia, Central Asia, or Southeast Asia. Though maritime shipping routes exist, these could be imperilled at key chokepoints such as the Straits of Malacca or the Gulf of Aden.
BRI therefore aims to offer investment in regional infrastructure to improve China’s connections to its neighbours and cheaper access to distant markets, especially Europe. Especially early in the project, the BRI constituted an alternative international development fund in the developing world ignoring human rights abuses or other regime problems that might make Western-backed institutions squeamish.
Constructing additional trade infrastructure offers not only development but also means of reducing the significance of pre-existing chokepoints such as Singapore and the Panama Canal. In the early 2000s, predictions that the United States could easily defeat China in a war by closing the Straits of Malacca and starving out the Chinese economy without risking tactical battles haunted Chinese strategic thought. In this light, Chinese construction of rail links through Laos-Thailand, Myanmar, and Pakistan to reach the Indian Ocean west of Malacca and the improvement of the People’s Liberation Army Navy to easily operate in the South China Sea seem specifically designed to overcome this old threat.
Man-built islands in the South China Sea (photo: Wikipedia)
In 2019, however, even governments relatively favourable to Chinese interests such as the Russian Federation and Belarus seem to extol the BRI’s virtues in the light of increasing their own strategic importance. African leaders flock to Beijing annually for conferences seeking investment to increase their strategic importance and compel Western investors to re-consider them if they are to access African resources and markets.
Furthermore, trade routes are constrained by geography. A quick glance at the map of Eurasia shows that any overland route between China and Europe must pass through either Russia or Iran. This gives these countries enormous power to veto construction of additional rail links. Considering the fraught state of political relations between Europe and both Russia and Iran, additional countries need to be subsequently mollified. Belarus has pitched itself as a BRI hub while Russia agitates against its current adversaries in Kiev. Poland and Romania have resisted Chinese investment in deference to recently-increased US security commitments against Russia. Going through Iran would require constructing infrastructure via Turkey through Kurdistan and other war-torn regions. Recent Chinese investment in Gwadar, Pakistan, has raised political trouble as it involves outside investment in Baluchistan, a restive region seeking greater autonomy with little pre-existing infrastructure. These historical problems and rivalries have previously prevented any significant infrastructure being built in these regions before. China hopes to paper this over by labelling all these investments as wholesome ‘development’ but is finding mounting difficulties keeping local governments committed to this purely as development rather than seeking their own political ends in the influx of investment.
China has already opened an overseas supply base in Djibouti to sustain a regular Navy escort presence in the Gulf of Aden to protect shipping from piracy off East Africa but commitment to this route depends on China’s favour with Egypt, a US major non-NATO ally with increasing ties to Russia. Furthermore, rising piracy off West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea raises the prospect of China requiring further Navy deployments to fully secure these maritime routes.
Complicating these logistical matters is the strategic question in the Indian Ocean: each Chinese Navy investment in the Indian Ocean mounts security angst in New Delhi. Chinese investment in Sri Lanka and its base in Djibouti have convinced India to compete for influence in the remaining potential ports, raising the international profiles of domestic political crises in such states as the Maldives and the Seychelles. Worse, Chinese investment in Pakistan to open a rail alternative to the Indian Ocean avoiding the Straits of Malacca greatly raises India’s threat perception in Chinese activities.
The other maritime option lies in the melting of Arctic sea ice, creating the Northern Maritime Route to Europe. However, this route gives Russia yet another potential veto on BRI development alongside its landmass sitting astride the overland route. Russia has taken increasing steps to fortify the Arctic route to prevent it falling under the sway of foreign powers. Russia also extracts lucrative payments from European and Chinese airlines for overflight rights between the two regions. Whilst journalists portend Russia as a dying power fading into the Chinese periphery, Moscow has used its geographic position to extract as many rewards as it can from the Chinese economy. For a supposedly suppliant partner, Russia continues to intermittently obstruct infrastructure projects from China to retain this power. Throughout 2018, Russia refused to discuss the BRI programme with China (despite Belarusian requests) and in April 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin forced Chinese President Xi Jinping to have their bilateral meeting within the 2nd BRI Forum in Beijing at his hotel rather than the Great Hall of the People, where Xi had all of his other meetings.
Lastly, US President Donald Trump’s trade war has transformed the political environment in the United States toward treating the Chinese economy as an adversary. As the Trump Administration (inconstantly) tries to rally Western governments against high-profile Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, the Chinese people and government are perceiving that their economic development has become the enemy or exploitable opportunity for virtually the entire outside world. Combined with the inability to shake domestic political problems in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, China appears increasingly geopolitically stuck in 2019.
In June, Xi visited North Korea but garnered little external press attention. Trump and Putin had already met Kim Jong Un, generating far more interest. Furthermore, Xi could only get a promise of more inter-Communist Party talks from the North Koreans. This pathetic result suggests China may need to try more drastic action to get the respect that it feels it deserves.
Autor
Nicholas Myers
Analyst of great power competition; Russian, US, and Chinese foreign policy; and the Russian and Belarusian militaries. He has been studying policy and statecraft for over 10 years, focusing especially on Russia. He has written a number of reports on the operational capabilities of the Russian military and overseen a wide variety of wargames of potential conflicts in the European Intermarium and Asia-Pacific regions. He is currently starting a PhD in Politics at the University of Glasgow, having just completed an MLitt in War Studies at the University of Glasgow and received his undergraduate degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 2011.
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