The Role of Belt and Road Reboot and China’s Elite Strategies in Global Geostrategic Competition

From the now largely eclipsed civil war in Sudan, to Europe and the Middle East Pax Americana is in trouble, if not gone. This is an outcome of global economic restructuring, the rise of China, authoritarianism in Russia and populism across the globe, enabled by self-reinforcing social media content and consumption. According to Macaes (2021) we are in an era of “geopolitics for the end times”, as a result of the climate emergency in particular. Where does China fit into this global conjuncture and how have its foreign policy strategies adapted?

China is now a superpower economically and politically, if not yet militarily. It has adopted a wide variety of foreign policies and doctrines in the last decade such as the Global Security, Civilizational and Defence initiatives, along with economic policies such as Made in China 2025; all designed to ensure the country’s continued rise. However, as economic growth in China has faltered and there is now more than 20% youth unemployment there has been a refocussing of energies overseas from a “full spectrum” approach involving multi-pronged economic and public diplomacy to one more focussed on elite capture as resources are in shorter supply.

Beijing’s signal or signature foreign policy is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) announced by President Xi in 2013. It has been, largely, a programme of global infrastructure construction, although there are also other elements to it, such as people-to-people exchange. In recent years the BRI has run into both discursive and “material” or financial trouble. The United States government has weaponised the discourse of “debt trap diplomacy” against the Initiative, with some success (Carmody, Zajontz, & Reboredo, 2022). Furthermore many BRI projects have either underperformed or failed to achieve their objectives, while also often resulting in substantial debt for the “host” governments. This has led China to dramatically scale-back and restructure new lending (Carmody & Wainwright, 2022). Nonetheless “it remains the world’s single largest official source of international development finance. China’s aid and credit (ODA and OOF) commitments to low and middle-income countries are now hovering around $80 billion a year” (Parks et al., 2023,1). By way of comparison the US now spends around $60 bn a year on development finance to low and middle income countries and has also launched its own initiatives to compete with the BRI, particularly the Build Back Better initiative. The Group of 7 (G7) now outspends China on overseas development assistance (ODA) and other official flows (OOF) by about $84 bn in 2021, having previously spent less.

While the BRI is often seen in Western capitals as a geopolitically offensive programme, another way to read it is as partly a response to the announced “Pivot to Asia” by the Obama administration in the US and a broader weaponization of the global economy by that state (Farrell & Newman, 2023), although its motivations were largely economically driven (Carmody, Taylor, & Zajontz, 2022). Despite its difficulties however the BRI cannot be abandoned because of sunk and reputational costs, the avenues of influence it still offers and the fact that it is now enshrined in the Chinese constitution. Consequently there have recently been attempts to renovate, restructure or “reboot” it.

There have been a variety of responses to the travails of the BRI by China both discursively and materially. One of these is a restructuring of the initiative to make it more sustainable, by downsizing, and focussing on smaller, more bankable projects (See Parks et al., 2023). A second approach has been to focus more closely on “elite capture strategies” (Benabdallah, 2023). As Parks et al. (2023, 2) note even as “Beijing’s public approval rating in the developing world plunged from 56% in 2019 to 40% in 2021… it has proven very capable of winning and retaining the foreign policy support of governing elites”. There are material reasons behind this as a 10% shift in voting alignment towards China at the United Nations results in a 276% increase in aid and loans from that country (Parks et al., 2023).

Whereas China has previously had a “full spectrum approach” where it engaged with a wider range of actors than other powers (Walsh, 2022), this would now appear to be being refined to focus more on political elites. This is a partly as a result of a lacklustre response to its public diplomacy/propaganda in the Global South (Eisenmann, 2023), and reflective of deepening authoritarianism at home which makes engaging publics overseas more difficult (Economy, 2018). The targeting of political elites and devoting less attention to publics and hard infrastructure development makes geopolitical sense. It may be more cost effective, geopolitically, in terms of the targeting of resources.

While in the past China has funded domestically run governance training schools, it has recently set one up in Tanzania between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and many of the ruling parties in the region. The school teaches the virtues of party-state fusion, thereby promoting authoritarianism as part of China’s “shadow empire” (Allen-Ebrahimian, 2023) as it seeks to protect its own interests and influence in the context of the “new cold war” with the United States and other Western powers[1]. Of course this is not an official breach of China’s principle of non-interference in other countries' internal affairs as this is a CCP, rather than Chinese state-sponsored venture, although the two are mutually imbricated and constituted. As Benabdallah (2023, 117) notes “China’s network approach goes beyond hosting delegations, trainings, and elite capture programs, and also activates those personal and professional bonds in order to build a more expansive network of ties”. This can be thought of as a form of “webpower” where the Chinese state penetrates its “private” sector through communist party cells for example. However China’s overseas approach is increasingly targeted. For example some suggest that there has been a period of “democratic backsliding” or “depression” in Africa in recent years, although this should not perhaps be over-stated as authoritarian governments often remained in power through presenting a democratic façade for donors and populations. However, if authoritarianism can be promoted there is less need to engage in public diplomacy. In such as situation what becomes important is the incentives, values, predisposition and strategies of elites for regime maintenance and how these align with Chinese government preferences. Thus the new strategic emphasis would appear to be on building bridges to gatekeeper elites who not only control territorial access to markets and resources but votes in international organizations and other venues of geopolitical support.

This shift from a primarily geoeconomic to a more geopolitical focus in engagements with some regions of the Global South, particularly Africa, has been noted in the literature. This reorientation is not without material content however, even if the “spigot” of Chinese finance has been turned down, if not off. The new push to create more conducive conditions for authoritarian maintenance offers elites the possibility to remain in power, thereby continuing to access and control access to national resources, potentially of significantly greater magnitude than those coming from China.

Of course people are not only materially motivated and China’s outreach also accords well with the ideology of “illiberal modernisers” who have come to prominence in recent decades in Africa (Dye, 2022) who favour “organizational Leninism” where development is designed and delivered by a “vanguard” elite. As Young (2012, 66) noted a decade ago “the major Chinese engagement with Africa is another factor challenging the supremacy of the liberal democratic state as normative model”.

The BRI is a sufficiently encompassing or “fuzzy” discursive envelope to encompass China’s different material and ideational flows and their imbrication (Narins & Agnew, 2020). The people-to-people exchange vector of the BRI has assumed increased importance in recent years given the issues noted above. Small investments in training, education and other offers can potentially have substantial geoeconomic and political payoffs. It allows for the development of “network power”, although these networks can be disrupted if incentives for participants change, as in the recent case of Angola for example (de Carvalho, Kopinsky, & Taylor, 2022). When the oil price collapsed in 2014 the economy there was badly affected and hundreds of thousands of Chinese left the country (Large, 2021). Another way to think of the new revised approach is as “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) even if as infrastructures of power rather than livelihood or survival in this case.

References

Benabdallah, L. (2023). Africa and US-China rivalry: between webs and bases. In S. S. F. Regilme (Ed.), The United States and China in the Era of Global Transformations. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Carmody, P., Taylor, I., & Zajontz, T. (2022). China's spatial fix in Africa: constraining belt or road to economic transformation? Canadian Journal of African Studies. 56(1), 57-77. doi:10.1080/00083968.2020.1868014

Carmody, P., & Wainwright, J. (2022). Contradiction and restructuring in the Belt and Road Initiative: Reflections on China’s Pause in the ‘Go World’. Third World Quarterly, 43(12), 2830-2851. doi:10.1080/01436597.2022.2110058

Carmody, P., Zajontz, T., & Reboredo, R. (2022). From “debt diplomacy” to donorship? China’s changing role in global development. Global Political Economy. 1(2), 198-217.

de Carvalho, P., Kopinsky, D., & Taylor, I. (2022). A marriage of convenience on the rocks? Revisting the Sino-Angolan relationship. Africa Spectrum. 57(1), 5-29.  doi.org/10.1177/00020397211042384.

Dye, B. J. (2022). Introduction: The ideology of the illiberal modernisers in Africa. Critical African Studies, 14(3), 219-230. doi:10.1080/21681392.2022.2151482

Economy, E. (2018). The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisenmann, J. (2023). China Is tweaking its [ropaganda for African audiences. Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/16/china-propaganda-africa-soft-power/.

Farrell, H., & Newman, A. (2023). Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. London: Penguin Books.

Large, D. (2021). China and Africa: The New Era. Cambridge: Polity.

Macaes, B. (2021). Geopolitics for the End Time: From the Pandemic to the Climate Crisis. London: Hurst.

Narins, T. P., & Agnew, J. (2020). Missing from the map: Chinese exceptionalism, sovereignty regimes and the Belt Road Initiative. Geopolitics, 25(4), 809-837. doi:10.1080/14650045.2019.1601082

Parks, B., Malik, A., Escobar, B., Zhang, S., Fedorochko, R., Solomon, K., . . . Goodman, S. (2023). Belt and Road Reboot: Beijing's Bid to De-Risk Its Global Infrastructure Initiative. AIDDATA, https://www.aiddata.org/publications/belt-and-road-reboot.

Simone, A. (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407-429. doi:10.1215/08992363-16-3-407

Walsh, B. (2022). Ugandan Agency within China-Africa relations: President Museveni and China's Foreign Policy in East Africa. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Young, C. (2012). The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

[1] Although according to Acharya (2018) we now live in a multiplex world order, rather than a multipolar one, where the power of different actors intermix and mingle rather than stand off against each other, with a struggle for network dominance now key (Schindler et al., 2023).