Andrew Browne
SHANGHAI—The VIP list at Beijing’s glittering launch party for its massive Silk Road trade plan was worth scrutinizing not for the luminaries who were on it, but those who weren’t.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who irritates Beijing by standing up to its bullying in the South China Sea, was notably missing; he didn’t get an invitation. European government heads were welcome, but mostly stayed away, as did leaders from India and Japan.
The no-shows reflect a broad disquiet: To skeptics, what President Xi Jinping calls the “Project of the Century” is, at heart, an imperial venture.
Eventually, China expects that the sprawling networks of trading infrastructure Mr. Xi proposes to install along ancient maritime and overland trails between Asia and Europe will tie together more than 60% of the world’s population and one-third of its gross domestic product.
Singapore and other nations are meant to understand that a new 21st-century order is emerging—a China-centric one. “Only vast lands can cradle great powers,” write Chinese geographers Du Debin and Ma Yahua.
Chinese propagandists hawk the “One Belt, One Road” plan as a cooperative enterprise—a “community of common destiny” is Mr. Xi’s lofty mantra.
To soften its harder geopolitical edges they evoke camel bells in the desert and caravans drifting from one oasis town to another.
For all that, it’s a power play. Beijing wants its neighbors, especially U.S. friends and allies, to know they have a with-us-or-against-us choice to make. An envoy from South Korea, hit with punitive Chinese trade sanctions over its deployment of a U.S. antimissile system, popped up on the belt-and-road guest list at the last minute, after the country elected a president whom Beijing favors.
China’s Communist leadership seems utterly convinced that the axis of global power is shifting from the Atlantic to the vast Eurasian landmass, and it’s just a matter of time before Central Asia, with its untold reserves of oil, gas and rare minerals, will once again become the crossroads of the world.
Mr. Xi is anxious to speed history’s turn. Donald Trump has become an unlikely abettor. If One Belt, One Road signals that a confident China is “changing from an adapter to a driver of globalization,” as the former Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen S. Roach asserts, then it is Beijing’s good fortune to have a U.S. president pressing an inward-looking “America First” agenda.
China is trying to build excitement around Xi Jinping's "One Belt, One Road" plan to expand trade with roads, railways and ports. Art installations like "Golden Bridge on Silk Road" and themed commercial products are supporting the campaign. Photo: Thomas Peter/Reuters
Under the One Belt, One Road initiative, Chinese President Xi Jinping aims to revive the ancient Silk Road trading routes with a network of trading infrastructure that he hopes will expand Beijing's clout to far-off destinations. Photo: AFP/Getty
As Mr. Trump’s first visit to Europe last week underscored, the U.S. alliance system—a pillar of the postwar liberal order— is under stress on both ends of a Eurasian continent that China seeks to dominate.
From Beijing’s point of view, it’s only natural that rewards from the trillion-dollar-plus One Belt, One Road project will flow to governments that support its imperial ambitions, and skeptics will be penalized.
A good case in point is the Philippines: After reversing his predecessor’s confrontational approach to Beijing over its territorial claims in the South China Sea, President Rodrigo Duterte picked up belt-and-road construction deals valued at billions of dollars to renovate his dilapidated hometown of Davao.
Shi Yinhong, the director of the Center for American Studies at Renmin University, uses the term “strategic economy” to describe the way China employs its immense financial resources to increase its regional influence at America’s expense.
Infrastructure has always been about power projection.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin, left, Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, and Argentine President Mauricio Macri, right, at the ‘One Belt, One Road’ summit in Beijing earlier this month. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Roman roads were conduits not just for trade and culture, but also marching armies. The string of Chinese-funded ports and industrial parks stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean could just as quickly be adapted to accommodate Chinese aircraft carriers and expeditionary forces.
Europeans in particular are unsettled by a vision of globalization that would dramatically extend the Chinese model of state capitalism. The environmental impact of the Chinese construction projects is one concern. Transparency is another.
In her book “China’s Eurasian Century?,” Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based National Bureau of Asian Research, writes that One Belt, One Road is “principally designed to serve national interests.”
She imagines what a continent dominated by China might look like: Chinese-built high-speed trains and fiber-optic cables shrinking its vast distances, but also, not implausibly, an internet firewall thrusting all the way to Europe, monitored by human and machine censors “who tamp down criticism of China.”
Independent-thinking countries on the Chinese periphery find themselves in a jam, none more so perhaps than Singapore. The bustling entrepôt stands to gain disproportionately from expanded trade under One Belt, One Road, and it has much to contribute. The city-state’s financiers, engineers and planners helped mastermind China’s own economic transformation.
Yet its uppityness toward Beijing may end up limiting its prospects. While Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi insists that One Belt, One Road “is not China’s solo, but a symphony,” the most enthusiastic players are the region’s like-minded authoritarians.
At Beijing’s summit, it was Vladimir Putin who picked up the musical theme with a rendition of “Moscow Windows” on a grand piano.
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