Christina Lu
Nearly a decade after its inception, momentum behind China’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) appears to be slowing as lending slumps and projects stall—forcing Chinese President Xi Jinping to again rethink a floundering initiative that he once hailed as his “project of the century.”
After doling out hundreds of billions of dollars, experts say China’s lending for BRI projects has plummeted, largely a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s own economic slowdown. Support has also waned as partner countries drown in debt and fractures emerge—literally—in projects, fueling uncertainty about the future of the sprawling initiative. In 2022, 60 percent of China’s overseas lending went to borrowers in financial distress, compared to just 5 percent in 2010, said Bradley Parks, the executive director of the AidData research group at the College of William and Mary.
“At its peak, it was really looked at as the centerpiece of China’s economic engagement with the rest of the world,” said Scott Kennedy, an expert in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Now, he said, it is a “shadow of its former self.”
Xi launched the BRI in 2013 as an ambitious infrastructure development campaign that would span more than 140 countries and export China’s industrial overcapacity, boosting China’s diplomatic clout and enhancing its global influence. Given its sheer scale and scope, many referred to it as China’s version of the Marshall Plan—only bigger and bolder. But Beijing’s vision has also been murky, intensifying scrutiny and controversy over the initiative and the contracts involved.
“No one really knows for sure what Beijing is trying to get out of it,” said Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center and the writer of Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief. “That sort of has lent this mystique to it that has led to a significant amount of suspicion, particularly from those governments that worry about China’s rise.”
Instead of a sleek geopolitical campaign, researchers describe the BRI as a decentralized jumble of deals and projects that all loosely fall under the same banner of infrastructure development. Hong Zhang, who researches Chinese public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that the BRI should be seen as a slogan, not a single program. “A lot of things were happening in the name of Belt and Road,” she said, adding: “Beijing has little control over things going on on the ground.”
China’s lending had already slipped before COVID-19 hit, a trend that was accelerated by the pandemic’s fallout and then China’s own economic slowdown. For many countries, taking on Chinese loans also quickly became unsustainable—particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up prices in the global marketplace—stoking backlash against Beijing’s lending habits.
One of the most glaring examples is Sri Lanka, which defaulted on a mountain of debt last year as it grappled with a spiraling economic crisis. But cracks emerged far earlier: After struggling to cough up enough money to Beijing in 2017, it signed over the rights to a strategic port, fueling alarm of the dangers of China’s lending practices. In Pakistan, which owes nearly one-third of its foreign debt to China, protests have erupted around a major port project. And in recent weeks, debt-laden Zambia has been tensely wrangling a restructuring plan with China, its biggest bilateral creditor.
The BRI has “fallen on hard times,” Kugelman said. “I think that many, many countries have realized that they simply don’t have the luxury of an economic structure that can withstand the type of loans that have been coming in from China for so long.”
Some of that can be attributed to the haphazard way in which the BRI was executed. To advance the initiative, many Chinese firms were so focused on administering projects that issues of economic feasibility and risk were not prioritized, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center.
“The Chinese did not think through the economic viability of a lot of these loan projects because their priority was [to] glorify BRI, to implement projects to ensure that BRI materializes and is happening all over the world,” she said.
As Sri Lanka buckled under its debt, China officially gave it a two-year debt moratorium in early February—and it’s just one of dozens of countries that have now been offered at least a partial reprieve. In 2020, China delayed debt repayments for 77 nations. But that has also left Chinese lenders swimming in risk, Parks said, leaving Beijing in a precarious economic position.
“They’re in a kind of firefighting mode,” Parks said. “They are frankly ill-equipped for the challenge that they’re up against right now because they don’t have a long history of being an overseas lender in times of crisis.”
Still, for many countries with few other options, Beijing has a lot to offer. Bangladesh, for instance, has been on a Chinese-funded infrastructure investment spree that has been quite popular, Kugelman said. In Latin America in particular, China has made new inroads and ramped up investments, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In an effort to contest China’s expanding influence through the BRI, many Western nations have been scrambling to offer up their own alternative development initiatives—with little success. By 2027, the United States and G-7 aim to funnel some $600 billion into their Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment—a revamp of the Build Back Better World campaign that they unveiled in 2021. Despite being launched more than a year ago, the European Union’s 300-billion-euro answer to BRI, called the Global Gateway, has failed to make much of a splash on the global stage.
“To be quite candid, I don’t think any country, whether the U.S. or any other nation, can hold a candle to what China has been able to do with its infrastructure investments,” Kugelman said. “It has such a deep footprint in so many parts of the world.”
Beijing now appears to be recalibrating its approach, softening its rhetoric around the BRI’s capabilities, focusing on smaller projects, and shifting course to offering debt-ridden countries emergency loans. In 2021, Xi also announced a Global Development Initiative (GDI), a small and vaguely defined program that emphasizes China’s position as one of the world’s developing countries, while focusing on education, clean energy, and poverty—all in conjunction with the United Nations. To further the GDI, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has urged cooperation with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The GDI reflects a more multilateral approach to development—potentially signaling Beijing’s effort to diversify its strategy in the long run, said Sun of the Stimson Center.
Parks said that the GDI could simply be an effort to rebrand the BRI amid mounting criticism. “I think it’s mostly smoke and mirrors,” he said.
But for all of its problems, don’t expect Beijing to abandon the BRI—or its underlying goals—given how deeply intertwined it is with Xi himself. In 2017, the initiative was even enshrined in the party constitution.
“Officially, you would never hear the Chinese government admitting that the Belt and Road was a mistake, or the way we approached Belt and Road was a mistake,” Zhang said. “That would not happen because Belt and Road is so closely tied to Xi Jinping’s personal political legacy.”
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