The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century

by Jonathan E. Hillman

  “The Asiatic Invasion”

  A century ago, the British geographer Halford Mackinder, sometimes called the father of modern geopolitics, pondered, “Is not the pivot region of the world’s politics . . . that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways?”23 That prediction did not foresee World War I, which derailed not only Eurasian railways but global integration more generally. Suddenly, Mackinder’s words sound plausible again. Thanks to generous Chinese subsidies, regular railway services have sprung up to connect nearly sixty Chinese cities with nearly fifty European cities.24

  If China is answering Mackinder’s question, the consequences could be monumental. He believed that Eurasia was the “geographical pivot of history” and that whoever controlled its heartlands controlled the world. In truth, what Mackinder called the “world island” never stopped mattering. Two decades ago, the former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski argued, “Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.”25 At the time, China was a regional power mostly confined to the Far East. It is now a global power pushing west.

  For China, Europe is the prize at the end of the supercontinent, but as Chapters 3–5 explain, treacherous terrain stands in the way. The challenges begin at China’s doorstep. As I learned when crossing Central Asia’s borders on foot and while hitching a ride across the Caspian Sea, the BRI is a middleman’s dream. Its megaprojects offer ample opportunities for bribery, kickbacks, and theft. These challenges are hardly limited to Central Asia. Indeed, the problem is not simply corruption where China aims to go but how it aims to get there: building massive projects with little transparency and accountability.

  Corruption is a feature, not a bug, of the BRI’s design. As a former president of China Export-Import Bank said in 2007, “We have a saying: If the water is too clear, you don’t catch any fish.”26 Giving Chinese companies an advantage by limiting outside scrutiny and competition might seem clever but could backfire spectacularly in the future. When projects are poorly chosen—because of political or corrupt considerations—and do not generate sufficient returns, recipients struggle to pay back loans. Scandals reveal the true beneficiaries of these deals, and popular resentment grows. When the water is murky, you cannot see the bottom.

  Russia is the gatekeeper for China’s overland ambitions, straddling as it does eleven time zones across the top of the Eurasian supercontinent and with deep ties to Central Asia; no other country is better positioned to spoil China’s eastward expansion. But Russia, economically and diplomatically isolated from the West, has few options. Xi and Putin have met over thirty times while in office, elevating their countries’ relations faster and higher than ever before. They now tout a strategic partnership, relishing the alarm this triggers in Western capitals.

  But one of the most visible symbols of the two countries’ economic partnership, a new bridge across the Amur River, hints at lasting divisions. Separated by less than a mile, each side feels like a different world. When I visited, the Chinese were amused that a foreigner was interested in their project. On the Russian side of the bridge, soldiers informed me that it was a “strategic project” and strictly off-limits. Thanking them, I turned to leave. “But you are already here,” their leader pronounced, turning my sightseeing trip into a day-long interrogation. U.S. policy makers could use Russia’s insecurities to stoke competition with China, but unintentionally, they have been pushing these historical enemies together.

  Central and eastern Europe are the bridgehead to Europe. To make inroads, China brings together seventeen central and eastern European heads of state every year. This “17+1” format, which includes EU and non-EU members, is deceptively designed. It gives the outward impression of multilateralism, but in practice, Chinese officials use these gatherings to strike bilateral deals. China’s checkbook disproportionately favors the non-EU governments, where investment rules are less transparent and open, causing European officials to worry that China is creeping through a “Balkan back door.”

  China’s divisive push into the European Union’s neighborhood could eventually help unite it.27 The EU has ramped up investment screening, branded China a “strategic competitor,” and launched its own connectivity initiative.28 These are small steps; but they reflect a growing consensus, and their direction is clear. Some EU officials are beginning to view China’s economic toolkit as seriously as they view Russia’s military. Mackinder would recognize this threat as an opportunity, a common cause around which to rally. “European civilization is,” he argued, “the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion.”29

  “The Pivot upon Which Everything Turned”

  Alfred Thayer Mahan, the most influential American strategist of the nineteenth century, would view the BRI’s maritime activities with suspicion.30 Unlike Mackinder, Mahan believed that history hinges on control of the sea. In his landmark study on sea power, Mahan approvingly quotes George Washington writing to Benjamin Franklin that “naval superiority . . . was the pivot upon which everything turned.”31 The most important source of that power, Mahan believed, was the tendency to trade. As the world’s largest trader and home to the second-largest merchant fleet, China has already arrived as a commercial naval power.32 Given that 90 percent of world trade travels by sea, the BRI’s maritime dimensions are likely to be more consequential than its overland dimensions. In that respect, we are still living in Mahan’s world, not returning to Marco Polo’s anytime soon.

  China’s path to the sea is contested, however, as Chapters 6–8 explain. Its overland and maritime ambitions converge in South and Southeast Asia, where it faces fierce competition from regional powers. Australia, Japan, India, and the United States are all working to provide alternatives to Chinese investment. Still, China is often its own worst enemy. Where the facts on the ground have not suited its position, it has changed the ground, creating artificial islands in the South China Sea and militarizing them with runways and missiles. Most countries want China’s investment and trade but find its increasingly aggressive behavior alarming. China’s partners might be smaller, but they are no less savvy. Many have far more experience dealing with outside powers than China has experience acting as one.

  In Southeast Asia, China is pushing to forge new north-south connections, while Japan is defending its east-west connections. Southeast Asian countries have turned this contest into their own investment buffet. No one knows the game better than Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former prime minister, who courted Japanese investment when he first took office in the 1980s. “The powerful will take what they will, the weak will yield what they must,” Mahathir reflected in July 2018, paraphrasing the Greek historian Thucydides to describe the challenge that China presents.33 But Mahathir was being sly and downplaying the strength of his hand. In Southeast Asia, the powerful pay what they must, and the weak take what they can.

  In South Asia, the flagship of China’s BRI may become its greatest test. Xi has put his personal stamp on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), traveling to Islamabad in April 2015 to cement the two countries’ “all-weather strategic cooperative partnership” and sign a host of agreements. But after ballooning to a mythical $100 billion, CPEC has drifted back to earth and delivered only a fraction of its initial promise. Dangerously, China is betting it can succeed where the United States and international community have failed for decades.

  If Chinese loans were cigarettes, Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port would be the cancerous lung on the warning label. Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s blindingly ambitious prime minister, borrowed heavily to build the port and other projects that carry his name and are hardly used. After China took a controlling ownership stake and a ninety-nine-year lease for the port, U.S. officials seized on the example to illustrate the perils of China’s “debt diplomacy.”34 But these critiques give China too much credit and
overlook the agency of recipient countries, where most solutions reside. The true story of Hambantota Port, as Chapter 8 recounts, is more chaotic than strategic and more Shakespearean drama than spy thriller.

  Risk and Reward

  Warnings about the “next Hambantota” miss an even bigger prize: digital infrastructure. Mackinder and Mahan, for all their wisdom, did not live in a world of airpower, let alone cyber power. While Western capitals debate the risks of allowing Chinese technology into their next-generation wireless networks, Chinese firms are rapidly connecting the world’s next-generation markets, as Chapter 9 explains. In East Africa, Chinese firms are laying underseas cables, equipping cities with surveillance cameras, and building wireless networks. On Maslow’s hierarchy of digital needs, network security is secondary to cost, positioning China’s tech champions to grow globally even if their Western presence withers.

  New connections, physical and digital, also produce unintended consequences. Eurasia’s ancient routes carried not only silk and horses but also Mongol invaders and the bubonic plague. Recent viral outbreaks have been concentrated in areas of Asia where burgeoning animal and human populations live in close proximity and which China aims to develop and connect with the world. Britain’s vast telegraph network carried not only colonial commands but also nationalists’ potent ideas for change and became “the means of challenging and undermining the very empire that created it,” as the historian Daniel Headrick writes.35

  Given this certainty of surprise, the BRI’s sheer scale demands attention. If China succeeds, it will become the most central node in global flows of goods, data, and people. Chinese technical standards, for everything from high-speed railway systems to wireless networks, will become more widely adopted, as will Chinese preferences for environmental and social safeguards, or the lack thereof. China’s military will benefit from expanded global access, and its diplomats will have more levers for influence. China will be stronger to impose its will, and the world will be weaker to resist. Over the longer term, the sum of these changes is not simply a world revised but a world remade. The Middle Kingdom will have returned.

  But China is more constrained than its imperial predecessors were, as Chapter 10 explains, and it will struggle to turn Xi’s grand vision into reality. China can co-opt, coerce, and gradually revise the status quo, one artificial island or highway at a time. But like a vampire at the door, China must be welcomed in by its hosts. By necessity, China’s imperialism is incremental and relies on economic means. It is also more vulnerable to scrutiny, and in the coming years, more observers will throw light onto China’s opaque practices. In response, China may end up embracing some of the standards it now resists—not out of goodwill but out of self-interest.

  Ironically, if the BRI is overhauled, Western policy makers might eventually regret that Chinese officials took their advice.36 A more focused, higher-quality effort could turn China from a lender of last resort into a preferred partner. It could spread Chinese influence in more targeted areas, from setting technology standards to swaying foreign capitals. It could limit China’s losses. Above all, it could demonstrate that China is succeeding where other great powers have failed.

  What is already clear is that the BRI is no Marshall Plan. It is much easier to rebuild developed economies, as the United States did in western Europe after World War II, than to develop economies. The Marshall Plan was a focused effort, concentrated on a narrow set of countries, spanning under five years, and involving a finite set of activities. Since leaving the station, China’s BRI has become a gravy train without a conductor. Its fevered pace has already exceeded China’s ability to accurately measure, let alone manage, these activities. Corruption and rent-seeking are thriving in the chaos. Conceptually, China’s BRI is closer to the War on Terror: poorly defined and ever expanding.

  There is no end in sight. Domestically and internationally, Xi has support to forge ahead. A pledge to pursue the BRI was added to the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution in 2017, suggesting that Xi’s vision could extend even beyond his lifetime tenure. At the second Belt and Road Forum, in 2019, Xi addressed an even larger audience of country representatives and heads of state. Unlike the War on Terror, of course, the BRI speaks more directly to the aspirations of developing countries. With few alternatives for investment, even leaders who shook their fists at the BRI while campaigning for office took the stage in Beijing to applaud it.

  As long as China has the wallet and the will to build new connections beyond its borders, it will have opportunities to do so. The question is whether the BRI will add to China’s power or detract from it. That hinges on China having the discipline to choose the right projects and walk away from the wrong ones. In the BRI’s first six years, its mission has not merely creeped but cascaded. Mistakes were surfacing even before the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed the global economy in 2020, exacerbating the BRI’s preexisting conditions and revealing how the very connections it aims to strengthen carry both promise and peril.

  As the following chapters show, the BRI is an imperial project in the rewards that China could reap as well as in the risks it faces. Before all roads lead to Beijing, Xi may be overreaching.

  Eastern Telegraph Company’s System and Its General Connections, 1901

  A.B.C. Telegraphic Code, 5th ed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Imperial Echoes

  Technology and the Struggle for Control

  IF YOU LISTEN CLOSELY, history sometimes more than rhymes. The trick is knowing where, or rather when, to put your ear. Quoting famous explorers like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta and flashing images of camels and desert caravans, Chinese officials have cloaked the BRI in romanticized notions of the Silk Road. The ancient silk routes set a high-water mark for connectivity in their time, but they were primarily a continental phenomenon focused on overland trade as opposed to a truly global phenomenon where maritime trade dominates, as it has since the sixteenth century. It is a brilliant marketing device, but in critical respects—politically, economically, and technologically—it is misleading.

  A more accurate—and alarming—parallel is the great-power competition that lasted from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, an imperial contest masterfully chronicled by the historian Daniel Headrick.1 Many of the BRI’s key technologies—deepwater ports, high-speed railways, and fiber-optic cables—are direct descendants of technology that Western powers leveraged during this period to expand their access to foreign markets. The costs, unintended consequences, and challenges faced by strong and weak states are telling as well. The world’s ruling and rising powers pursued major infrastructure projects to expand their influence at the expense of indigenous people, the environment, and economic stability. As a weaker state, China resisted strategies similar to those it now employs as a rising power.2

  The echoes are loudest on the ground, where China is figuratively and sometimes literally retracing the steps of imperial powers. In 2018, China began manufacturing a new fiber-optic cable, the Pakistan and East Africa Cable Express, or PEACE, which will become the shortest route for high-speed internet traffic between China and Africa.3 A century and a half ago, Britain was wrapping the world with telegraph cables to protect its colonial interests, including one through Gwadar, the same port town in Pakistan where China’s new cable will begin. China now operates Gwadar’s port as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a risky endeavor examined in Chapter 7.

  Kenya is another primary stop on the PEACE cable. In 2017, it opened a $3.3 billion railway, its most expensive infrastructure project since independence, built with Chinese financing and by Chinese contractors. As Chapter 9 explains, the railway shuttles passengers from Mombasa to Nairobi, running alongside a railway built by the British in 1901 and, over the objections of environmental groups, through Kenya’s national parks. Privately, World Bank officials say it would have been cheaper to upgrade the British line. A leaked report from Kenya’s auditor general has warned that defaulting on these loans
could allow China to take control of Mombasa Port.4

  Sri Lanka has become the poster child for risky borrowing along China’s BRI, a controversy that Chapter 8 examines. In December 2017, a Chinese state-owned enterprise took over a deepwater port in Hambantota, a small fishing town on Sri Lanka’s southern coast. The port was never intended to be Chinese owned and operated, but it was Chinese financed and built, adding to a debt that Sri Lanka could not repay.5 China now has a ninety-nine-year lease, the same length that Britain once secured for Hong Kong. No one needs to draw this connection for Sri Lankans, who won their independence from British colonial rule seventy years ago.

  These flagship projects are just a few episodes in China’s BRI, a global drama that is still unfolding, yet they evoke familiar plotlines. Since ancient times, infrastructure has been not only a feature or by-product of empire but also a tool for imperial expansion.6 Rome built a network of roads to carry commerce, information, and the most formidable soldiers in antiquity across an expanding domain. The same road network that Darius the Great used to control the Persian Empire in the fifth century BC was used by Alexander the Great to conquer it two hundred years later. At the height of the ancient silk routes, the Mongol Empire established a network of postal roads that carried messengers and envoys.