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

by Jonathan E. Hillman

  It was savvy political theater, but each new effort further complicated a set of activities that was already unmanageable. Even an official BRI advisory group, composed mainly of former heads of state and other international officials, observed, “unlike many international platforms for economic cooperation, the [Belt and Road Forum] currently has neither a centralized coordinating mechanism . . . nor a clear set of underpinning work streams.”10 Beneath the diplomatic couching, the point was brutally honest. What happened between the forums, of course, was the BRI itself.

  All Aboard

  Even as Xi’s vision gained support in foreign capitals, it was being skewed on the ground. “Thanks to the joint efforts of all of us involved in this initiative, a general connectivity framework consisting of six corridors, six connectivity routes and multiple countries and ports has been put in place,” Xi said.11 Corridors are economically valuable when transportation infrastructure connects cities and industrial hubs, helping facilitate the flow of people and goods.12 In the BRI’s case, there is also advertising value because the corridors lend credibility and a semblance of structure to an otherwise amorphous undertaking. The only problem is that they remain more myth than reality.

  As China is learning, international corridors are as easy to imagine as they are difficult to implement. With the exception of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Xi’s corridors remained mostly broad brushstrokes on an aspirational map. Unlike the corridors managed by the Asian Development Bank and other multilateral banks, the BRI’s corridors were not defined below the national level to include specific cities and roadways. Around the BRI’s five-year anniversary in 2018, as much Chinese-financed project activity was happening outside the corridors as inside them.13 Either Chinese officials were not following these priorities, or they were struggling to bring them about.

  Having never provided a detailed blueprint, Xi’s initiative became a Rorschach blot. Everywhere, inside and outside China, interest groups have gazed upon it and seen different things. What they see often reveals more about themselves than anything else. Naturally, most interpret the BRI to suit their own interests.

  China’s massive state-owned enterprises grabbed the BRI banner but have not marched lockstep to Beijing’s tune. Outside China, they often have more influence on the ground than Chinese officials. They have deeper local connections, more technical expertise, and more staff in recipient countries. They lobby local politicians and Chinese ministries to propose and approve projects. They bid on projects even when the Chinese embassy instructs them not to. Pushing back can be risky for Chinese officials who aspire to climb higher up the party ladder. The heads of China’s biggest national champions are vice ministers, an administrative rank that few active Chinese ambassadors achieve.14 With savvy and standing, they exploit fissures among Chinese ministries.

  China’s own government is far from united on the BRI’s priorities, and its aid process is fragmented.15 Among the main agencies, the Ministry of Commerce usually wields the most power and places a higher priority on profitability, resource extraction, and other economic considerations. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is often the second most influential and more inclined to view projects as political tools to strengthen bilateral ties. The Ministry of Finance is charged with evaluating lending risks. China’s largest lenders, China Development Bank and China Export-Import Bank, are dedicated to promoting exports and strengthening China’s national champions. The PLA and other parts of the party-state bureaucracy have their own interests, as does every province. Rarely do projects check all these boxes. In the BRI’s initial years, the universe of projects has been wide enough to give something to everyone. Competition among these perspectives will intensify if the pipeline shrinks.

  Since the BRI left the station, it has become a gravy train without a conductor or adequate crew. The National Development and Reform Commission was initially tasked with coordinating the BRI. Its performance is self-evident. The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Foreign Aid, or DFA, has roughly seventy staff to oversee all aid.16 To improve coordination, Chinese ministries and provinces have created working groups.17 It is unclear whether these efforts are improving project outcomes or simply another reflection of political incentives for visibly supporting Xi’s vision. None of these entities have adequate staff and expertise, particularly outside China, for managing the project of the century.

  In 2018, China announced a new aid organization, the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA), that is unlikely to resolve these challenges.18 It is intended to play a greater role in planning and oversight but sits uncomfortably in the shadow of more powerful agencies. The Ministry of Commerce’s DFA makes up two-thirds of the new agency. The Ministries of Commerce and Foreign Affairs still control project implementation. When things go wrong, CIDCA could struggle to challenge either of them, since it is a more junior agency. More effective oversight would be costly, politically and financially. It would require shifting power away from those who currently hold it. It would also require raising a small army of management staff and technical advisers and deploying them across the world.

  Recipient countries have their own priorities. Their participation should not be confused with consenting to Xi’s version of the BRI. They face risks, of course, especially when China’s offer is the only one on the table. Even those with forward-looking development plans can fall victim to politicians’ universal impulses to build projects for personal gain. But China’s checkbook is not the barrel of a gun, and every project is a negotiation. With greater technical capacity, planning, and oversight, recipient countries can incorporate responsible amounts of Chinese investment into their overall development plans while safeguarding their independence. More than anyone else, they hold the future of Xi’s signature effort in their hands.

  The Connectivity Conundrum

  Of the BRI’s six corridors, CPEC is the exception that proves the rule. Despite being called a corridor, its connectivity is weak, as Chapter 8 explained, and transportation is entirely cut off for several winter months each year. It is also the only corridor of the six that involves China and a single country. The others include as many as seven countries, making coordination even more difficult. Held up as the BRI’s flagship corridor, CPEC showcases the limits of Chinese power.

  The Chinese side of CPEC, which is rarely discussed, reveals what is perhaps the BRI’s biggest contradiction. There is a fundamental tension between the connectivity that China says it seeks through the BRI and the control it is unwilling to give up. Even as China claims to be championing globalization and broadening ties, it is clamping down in areas that BRI routes are intended to pass through, potentially crippling its own projects.19

  China’s connectivity conundrum was painfully evident when I visited Kashgar, a historic city in southwestern China. Marco Polo once described it as “the biggest city, and the most splendid” in Turkestan.20 It is now ground zero for Beijing’s repression of ethnic minorities. Police stations, with lights flashing as if to convince the public of a constant state of emergency, were as common as Starbucks are in New York City. Cameras were everywhere. The Id Kah Mosque, the largest in China, seemed designed to catalogue those who are practicing Islam rather than to provide them a space to worship in peace. It can accommodate 20,000 people but was deserted.

  Beijing has been ramping up security measures since July 2009, when ethnic riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, resulted in at least two hundred deaths. The aftermath of the riots saw the internet cut off in the region for over a year. Thousands of police stations were built, and police recruitment has risen dramatically. By 2017, Xinjiang’s police force was more than five times the size it had been a decade earlier, and the province’s spending on surveillance technology skyrocketed to $3.5 billion.21 That year, Xi called for building a “Great Wall of Iron” around the province.22 While promoting a vision for connecting the world, Xi was raising a fortress at home.

  Leav
ing Kashgar, I drove six hours to Tashkurgan, the last major town before China’s border with Pakistan and a stop along ancient trading routes. It is perched at more than ten thousand feet in the Pamirs, a range where the Himalayas, Tian Shan, and other mountains meet. The places between these mountains are distinct worlds, connected only by a thread of pavement. The monotony of the dunes and desert was broken by switchbacks and long climbs. When the road levels, verdant pasture stretches to the horizon. Roaming freely, shaggy-haired yaks drank from a glacial blue river. Weighing over one thousand pounds, these beasts are so well adapted that Chinese security forces still use them to patrol the area’s rugged terrain.

  The beauty of the great open spaces outside Tashkurgan collides with a harsher reality inside it. The city felt like a remote outpost preparing for a siege that will never come. An armored vehicle cruised slowly along a main street. Walls, gates, and barbed wire surrounded hulking government buildings and a handful of hotels. Security guards sat inside buildings, halfheartedly patting down visitors after they passed through metal detectors. Shields, batons, and other riot gear were stashed near entrances.

  Within this security bubble, commerce was sluggish and mostly local. There was no sign of activity at the Khunjerab Port, which aspires to become a logistics hub and is named after the three-mile-high mountain pass that links China and Pakistan. Economic activity ebbs and flows according to the seasons, holidays, and other factors, but Tashkurgan was undoubtedly sleepy.

  One sector was thriving. Stern and oversized, local police and security buildings looked like foreign embassies. Spending on security-related construction in Xinjiang tripled in 2017, inflating the region’s official growth rate.23 The police themselves were busy at the local gas station, where a long line of cars and trucks were waiting for their approval to refuel. Words and handshakes allowed some vehicles to cut the line. The police seemed to be not only providing order but profiting from the demand to get in.

  Dangerously, Xinjiang’s GDP figures do not measure what matters. China’s security-industrial complex artificially boosts growth while destroying value. It overbuilds, enlarging the scope of projects and delivering others that serve little purpose. But even worse are the projects that are used. After all, what is their purpose? Physical capital is erasing human capital. China does all of this in the name of security and growth. It may end up with less of both.

  In addition to the monumental human cost of this security crackdown, domination of daily life by security forces stands in the way of greater economic activity. Intrusive security personnel and ubiquitous checkpoints make it difficult to send and receive packages. Local laws require citizens to participate in “antiterror” drills as often as three times a day, weekly flag-raising ceremonies, impromptu identification and appearance inspections (beards and hijabs are prohibited), and other intrusions that distract from running a business. The BRI is designed to enable trade, but Beijing’s paranoia constrains commerce at every turn.

  This is not a flaw limited to Xinjiang but one that runs to the very core of Xi’s vision. He promises that the BRI will increase international financial flows, but its capital controls stand in the way. Hardest to reconcile may be Xi’s promise to speed the flow of information and ideas. As he said at the first Belt and Road Forum, “The ancient silk routes were not for trade only, they boosted flow of knowledge as well.”24 But Chinese censorship and cybersecurity laws have become more intrusive. China is also offering to help other countries learn from its “Great Firewall”—in effect sharing knowledge to limit knowledge sharing.

  Of course, greater connectivity of all kinds brings disruption as well as benefits. China’s leaders, valuing their continued rule above all else, may have a high tolerance for forgoing economic gains from connectivity in the name of political stability. They would do well to recall, however, that the very “Silk Road” images they promote represent an improvement in connectivity: camels, caravans, and merchants. If the BRI’s most powerful images are symbols of stasis—police checkpoints, long lines of trucks, and barbed wire—there will not be much to remember.

  All empires have grappled with the challenge of balancing connectivity while maintaining control, and they have responded to it in different ways, from direct means such as colonies to indirect means such as proxies and treaty ports. Strikingly, China faces these challenges not merely in distant lands, and in its immediate neighborhood, but also at home.

  Incremental Imperialism

  China’s BRI is clearest when measured against the imperial projects that came before it. It is a product of China’s rise as well as a tool for exercising and increasing its power. Many of China’s activities—seeking access to markets, cultivating influence in foreign capitals, and expanding its military footprint—are classic rising-power behaviors. There are historical parallels with the technology that China is using, the places it is going, and its advantages over weaker partners. Acknowledging that these activities are not entirely unique, however, does not mean writing them off as harmless. On the contrary, these imperial echoes should urge caution.

  The longer China’s rise continues, the more likely its overseas activities will take on a sharper military edge. Even more than providing a means for expanding Chinese military activities, the BRI provides a motive by placing Chinese workers and investments in dangerous environments. In the absence of adequate security, China could assume a greater role in protecting its workers and investments, if partner countries allow it. China’s first official military base on foreign soil, in Djibouti, will not be its last. From ancient Rome to the Mongol Empire to the British Empire, trade has never traveled far, for long, without the flag.

  “Imperialism” is so loaded, so heavy a term, that it can be distracting. It may be easier to think objectively about China’s BRI purely in terms of power without the historical baggage. There have been different forms of imperialism, of course, and there is a rich debate about defining it.25 The Oxford English Dictionary, which appropriately was created during imperial Britain’s reign, offers one definition of “imperialism” that feels timeless: “the extension and maintenance of a country’s power or influence through trade, diplomacy, military or cultural dominance, etc.”26 That “etc.” demands more attention from scholars, particularly how new technologies provide avenues of influence, but China is, quite obviously, extending its power and influence through these means. The BRI’s ambitions are imperial, even if they may not succeed.

  Equally important is understanding how Chinese power and influence, extended through the BRI, are different. As Howard French observes when considering China’s activities in Africa, “What one must grant is that every imperial project throughout history is distinctive.”27 Even more than its predecessors, China’s imperialism is economic and incremental. This stems from China’s capabilities as well as the constraints that it faces. The BRI is tailored to deploy China’s comparative advantages, especially its massive state-owned firms. The world’s needs for infrastructure and investment are insatiable, but China faces a much higher bar in its pursuit of influence beyond its borders.

  Compared to the European powers that partitioned Africa, China’s actions are more constrained by international norms. International law has developed, particularly after World War II, to protect the sovereignty of states and the rights of individuals. Taking territory by force, a preferred method of great powers past, is prohibited. These laws can be ignored, of course, as Russia seems to remind the world every few years, but doing so comes with a steeper cost. Instead, China relies on means short of force to advance its aims. It can co-opt, coerce, and gradually undermine the status quo, one artificial island at a time. But for the most part, foreign leaders must choose to participate in China’s activities.

  Unlike Truman’s Point IV program, the BRI is often found wanting because it is measured against well-developed multilateral standards. When U.S. companies built massive dams in Pakistan during the 1960s that displaced large populations, environmental- and
social-impact studies were comparatively underdeveloped. Corruption was treated more as a cost of doing business. Modern safeguards at the World Bank and other multilateral development banks may have become too cautious, overly expensive, and slow. But they also reflect an attempt to learn, perhaps overlearning, from decades of mistakes.28 When China ignores international best practices, its errors look worse.

  The world is watching even more closely. Imagine the British building a railway from Mombasa to Nairobi under the glare of cell-phone cameras and social media. Labor abuses, while still underreported, are easier to document with mobile communications. Satellite imagery, once accessible only to a handful of governments, is widely available to the public at low cost. Environmental groups can monitor changes in land from their desks. Journalists benefit from all these tools and larger document leaks. In the coming years, more efforts will throw light onto China’s opaque practices.

  Compared to Japan’s infrastructure push in the 1980s, Chinese leaders are more insulated from internal and external pressure. Recent corruption scandals in Malaysia, unlike Japan’s missteps in the Philippines during the 1980s, have generated comparatively little public outcry within China. Chinese state media are dedicated to amplifying BRI success stories and countering negative publicity. Publicly and privately, the United States pressed Japan to improve its foreign-aid practices, helping to strengthen reformers within the Japanese government.29 China does not have a partner to provide that pressure, and its relations with the United States are only deteriorating.

  Japan’s experience suggests that Xi’s assurances will not persuade Western skeptics. The fear that Japan inspired in the United States, a fellow democracy and ally, only subsided after Japan’s economy tanked. At the peak of U.S. anxiety, some experts foresaw a coming war with Japan.30 Their alarm blinded them to the pressures building within Japan’s economy. In the early 1990s, a severe financial crisis halted Japan’s three-decade-long “economic miracle” and began its “lost decade.” In marveling at China’s expanding global footprint, it is easy to overlook the challenges it faces. The BRI’s risks run both ways, and recognizing it as an imperial project does not imply that it will succeed.