China’s Silk Road plan is changing its face. The major infrastructure programs of past years are over, China is in an economic crisis and is having difficulty getting back the loans it gave generously in the early years. From a phase of “large freehand brushstrokes” we are now moving on to meticulous brushwork, Xi Jinping said in his speech to the third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on Wednesday. China’s head of state and party leader praised “numerous groundbreaking, small and beautiful projects that benefit the people.” Start big and then worry about the details: actually a typical Chinese approach.
But it was also the first Silk Road summit, which China ultimately only organizes for authoritarian states and developing countries. While numerous European representatives came to the summits in 2017 and 2019, there were now only around twenty heads of state and government, mostly from autocratically led states, listening. In a hall of the Great Hall of the People, Xi addressed business representatives and delegations from more than 130 countries. A prominent guest was “dear friend” Vladimir Putin, who, given the size of his country, stood next to Xi in all the photos and was also the first to speak after him. Then came the Kazakh president. The West did not send a senior representative.
Xi tried to counteract the impression that the Silk Road Club was now an anti-Western event by indirectly criticizing the USA: “Ideological confrontation, geopolitical rivalry and bloc politics are out of the question for us.” Who sees the development of others as a threat and economic interdependence I see it as a risk, it doesn’t make one’s own life better or development faster.
China should be at the center of the world order politically and economically
He left no doubt that Xi is continuing his Belt and Road Initiative ten years after it began and is sticking to its geopolitical ambitions. “Belt and Road” is enshrined in the statute of the Communist Party. Xi promised ninety billion euros for future financing, while another ten billion euros will flow into a fund to support development aid projects. This is little compared to the almost one trillion euros that Beijing is said to have invested in total under the “Belt and Road” brand. Investments have been declining since 2016. But not all projects have failed. The fact that China has now become the largest bilateral creditor of many developing countries also increases Beijing’s political leverage in these countries. “We can start a competition to see who can build more schools and bridges in developing countries,” said Foreign Minister Wang Yi combatively.
The Silk Road project is intended to put China back at the center of the world order politically and economically, as Xi has derived from history. To do this, he wants to turn Eurasia, which is increasingly dominated by China, into an economic area that sets itself apart from the transatlantic area dominated by America. This was reflected at the conference. The Western absence was justified by Putin’s presence. But there is more to it than just the Russian president. “The formation of blocs is now a reality,” says lawyer and sinologist Moritz Rudolf from Yale University, who took part in a forum at the summit. “China is concerned with building an order that is less Western-centric.” Xi announced new measures for common legislation. Discussion forums focused on joint fights against corruption and police cooperation. Xi announced another logistics corridor. China will expand rail connections to Europe and participate in the Trans-Caspian international transport corridor. The Trans-Caspian connection leads to Europe via Kazakhstan and the Middle East. This reduces dependencies on sea routes, for example, whose bottlenecks are usually controlled by Western powers.
Putin immediately embraced Xi Jinping’s counter-Western approach. In his speech, Russia’s president mentioned the increased integration of the Eurasian Union with China, which has long had the upper hand there. Putin then praised new connections that also led from the Arctic region to the south. Putin praised the Silk Road project as a path to a “fairer, multipolar world.” It is a “global plan” that Russia and the “majority of the world’s states” would join. Putin emphasized the “right of every state to choose its own development model”.
The fact that this development model is largely free of democracy corresponds not only to the policy of most of the state guests from Central Asia and Africa who traveled to Beijing, but also to Xi Jinping’s desire to group the so-called “global south” around China. “As long as we regard each other as friends and partners, respect each other, support each other and render services to each other, we will be able to help each other,” Xi said. Only the pace of the Silk Road projects could slow down. At the summit, China raised the two overarching forums of digital economy and green development to the same level as the old forum on connectivity. Particularly in the area of green technologies, in which China often controls entire value chains, Beijing expects international interest, including from the West, which is interested in climate protection. But this is no longer possible via the Silk Road. “People no longer court the West,” says sinologist Rudolf. “He was abandoned here.”
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