In 2013, President Xi Jinping first introduced the idea of Belt and Road. The West failed to recognise its significance. But it quickly generated a sense of curiosity and expectation in East Asia and beyond. What was it? How would it work? What would it mean? They were not easy questions to answer. Belt and Road was not a plan containing a set of aims and deadlines. Contrary to the way major initiatives are usually launched, Belt and Road started off life as an idea. At its heart was the ambition to transform the infrastructure of the Eurasian landmass. Eurasia, a term which had largely fallen into disuse, certainly in the West, contains around 65% of the world’s population, bookended by East Asia in the east and Europe in the west. The idea began to take shape as it grew over time. It was like a living organism. There was no membership and no constitution. It consists of a multitude of bilateral agreements between China and a vast array of countries. It will in time probably spawn a range of regional multilateral agreements. There is really no precedent. It is a genuine original and very much a creation of its time. We should think of it as an entirely new kind of institution.

Eight years on, it has expanded enormously. 139 countries have formally affiliated with the Belt and Road Initiative, a huge figure given that there are only 193 member states of the United Nations. The two summits it has held so far, the last in 2018, attracted an extraordinary number of prime ministers and government leaders, especially from the developing world. No other country, the US included, could assemble such a representative gathering. All ten ASEAN countries are participants, many countries in Central and South Asia are involved, some in the Middle East plus Turkey, while many Latin American and African countries have signed up to BRI projects. The major absentees are the US, India, and Japan. 

The term Eurasia, as we can see, is elastic. Eurasia is, in effect, a metaphor for the developing world, hence the presence of African and Latin American countries. At the heart of Belt and Road is the relationship between China and the developing countries which together account for 85% of the world’s population. China, while never considering itself to be a model for others, nonetheless believes that its own economic transformation does have lessons for other developing countries: that a combination of infrastructural investment, an activist state, and economic growth are the key to the transformation of developing countries. This lies at the core of the appeal of Belt and Road to the developing world: if China has done it, why can’t we?

Belt and Road has three main arteries: the land route, the maritime route, and digital connectivity. It is not inappropriate to think of it as a latter-day, multi-dimensional Silk Road, a way of connecting the east and west of Eurasia in a modern idiom. China has enormous advantages in this context. It is by far the largest trading country in the world, with the great majority of the countries involved in Belt and Road counting China as their biggest trading partner; Chinese companies now own, or partially own, many, if not most, of the major ports across Eurasia; while China’s digital capacity and reach have grown enormously over the last decade, putting it not far short of the United States in the digital world, and in some fields ahead. 

The heartlands of the Belt and Road project might be described as the ASEAN countries, where there are a very large number of agreements, and Pakistan, which so far has seen the largest investment, but this is to greatly underestimate its scale and reach. The agreement with Russia, for example, to help fund and build a new pipeline from Russia to China underpins arguably the closest relationship the two countries have ever historically enjoyed and underwrites Russia’s involvement in Belt and Road. The Central Asia countries, crucial to the land route, are also heavily involved.

But what of the West? Europe might be described as a slow burn. Greatest enthusiasm has been shown by the sixteen countries of central and eastern Europe, hence the grouping termed 16 plus one, the one being China; since it was first launched Greece has joined while Lithuania left earlier this year. Southern Europe, in the form of Portugal, Greece (already mentioned) and Italy (the only member of the G7 to formally sign up to BRI), has shown growing interest in Belt and Road. Germany has the deepest economic relationship with China of any European country but has largely kept at arm’s length with regard to Belt and Road. It seems likely that Europe, a great trading continent, a far bigger trader than the United States, will increasingly need China and East Asia and the opportunities and possibilities that Belt and Road can offer. This process is being hastened by the growing distance that has opened up between the US and Europe over recent decades, which was greatly accelerated by the Trump presidency and has showed no sign of closing since. 

Which brings us to the United States. From the outset it chose more or less to ignore Belt and Road, utterly failing to grasp its potential significance. When this became impossible to ignore, the US attacked the project on the grounds that it would become a debt trap for poorer countries and warned them not to sign up to it. This criticism also gained support in some European circles; in fact, the only evidence that anyone can point to is the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, when China had to bail out the government in return for a 99-year lease on the port. At the G7 meeting in June this year, it became clear that the United States had finally come to a recognition that Belt and Road had achieved major traction in the developing world and in response proposed an alternative scheme for which it is seeking European support. The chances of this posing any serious challenge to Belt and Road are close to zero. The US enjoys nothing like the prestige and empathy that China commands amongst the developing countries. Infrastructural investment, furthermore, is enormously state-dependent and the US proposal depends heavily on private investment which is notoriously averse to funding infrastructural projects. 

Belt and Road is still in its infancy. It should be considered as at least a fifty-year project, if not longer. Its impact, already considerable, will be colossal. It will literally reconfigure the world: it will hasten the rise of the developing world; it will consolidate East Asia as the epicentre of the global economy; it will draw Europe irresistibly eastwards; it will make the Eurasian landmass far more important than North America; it will serve to diminish the role and influence of the US in the global economy; it will greatly enhance China’s role in the world; and ultimately it will underpin the emergence of a new and different kind of global order. The immediate postwar Marshall Plan, which was on a much smaller scale than Belt and Road, remade the West and gave it a decisive advantage in the Cold War. Belt and Road will prove hugely more important and far more influential in shaping a new world. 

L'articolo How Belt and Road is changing the world proviene da InsideOver.

2020 started very badly for China. In January it was confronted with a new virus that it did not understand. It came under savage criticism from the West for being slow off the mark and for allegedly covering up the extent of the virus. By late January the Chinese government was aware of the deadly threat posed by COVID-19 and with great speed proceeded to lock down Wuhan and much of Hubei province.

In March the virus began to spread across Europe and the United States, and progressively across the world. The West had had at least two months to learn from China and other East Asian countries. That time was squandered. The West was totally unprepared. It was an extraordinary display of provincialism – the assumption that a virus in East Asia could not possibly spread to the West.

What Conclusions Can be Reached After One Year of COVID?

A year later and it is clear that the West has been utterly incapable of dealing with the virus. Without a vaccine, we would be destined to co-exist with COVID-19 indefinitely, perhaps forever. In stark contrast to China, the objective was never clear: was it to eliminate the virus or to contain it? In practice, in every Western country bar New Zealand, the reality was containment. No attempt was made to eliminate it. Without a clear overarching goal, government policy constantly yo-yoed.

Should the priority be life or the economy? The initial lockdowns were followed by opening up until it was realized, too late, that the virus was again out of control, and restrictions and then another lockdown were once more needed. There was, alongside this, a continuing argument about the rights of the individual versus the role of government.

In Donald Trump’s America, the economy took overwhelming priority over life and individual rights took precedence over the role of government. Europe was more like a halfway house. In civil society, people failed to grasp the new disciplines with the speed and universality that was required: mask-wearing, social distancing, staying at home and the rest. COVID-19 bore witness to a disastrous failure of governance. We know the price in human life that has been paid.

Asia Did Far Better Than the West in Tackling the Coronavirus

It did not have to be like this. China, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, Japan did far better. Around 4,600 people have died in China out of a population of 1.4 billion; over 400,000 in the US (population: 328 million) and over 100,000 in the UK (population: 67 million). Unlike everywhere else, China, we should not forget, was on the front line with a preparation time of zero.

Why did the West fail miserably and why did the East Asian countries, in contrast, succeed in the near-elimination of the virus? Ultimately, the reason is systemic.

The governments in East Asia showed far greater competence and took a strategic view of what was needed. The people were similarly disciplined. They expected and required government to provide leadership. These societies are rooted in a Confucian tradition which respects government, puts society above the individual, and is socially responsible. The response of Western governments was belated, behind the curve, confused, a prisoner of vested interests, lacking a strategic perspective and for the most part incompetent.

China’s Unprecedented Rise

We are all familiar with the extraordinary rise of China over the last forty years; from when it was 5% of the size of the US economy in 1978 to the present when it is roughly a fifth larger than the US (according to GDP measured in terms of primary purchasing power). It has been the most remarkable economic transformation in human history. The defining moment, hitherto, in China’s rise and America’s decline was the Western financial crisis in 2008. While China was largely unaffected, the US was plunged into its greatest crisis since 1931. The result was a major shift in global economic power from the United States to China. In the years that followed there was a dawning realization that China was likely to replace the US as the world’s leading economic power.

The pandemic will have a similar economic effect, but on a much bigger scale. By virtue of the fact that it managed to defeat COVID-19, China was able to open up its economy from the early summer last year. Despite the huge economic hit it took in the first quarter, the Chinese economy grew by 2.3% in 2020, a remarkable achievement under the circumstances.

In contrast, the US economy contracted by 3.7%, the UK by 11.4% and the eurozone by 7.6%. With the West still mired in the pandemic, though mass vaccination will over time serve to ameliorate the situation, and China back to normal, the marked disparity in growth will continue in 2021 and probably 2022 and beyond. The economic cost of failing to defeat COVID-19 over a prolonged period will be enormous and cast a shadow over much of the 2020s; it is now widely projected that China’s GDP as measured in dollars will overtake that of the United States in 2028, a year or two earlier than was previously thought.

The Geopolitical Impact of the Pandemic is Far More Than Just Economic

However, it would be a mistake to measure the impact of the pandemic in primarily economic terms. Hitherto China’s rise has overwhelmingly been seen as an economic phenomenon. But it is governance rather than the economy that has dominated the pandemic. The ability of economies to recover has been a function of the capacity of governance to defeat the virus. Politics, or political systems and cultures, rather than economics has been the overriding factor.

In this context, China has triumphed and the West, above all the United States, has failed disastrously. In the geopolitical contest between a rising China and a declining US, the pandemic has been the first occasion when the question of governance has been both center-stage and decisive.

The pandemic has seen the greatest failure of liberal democracies since 1945. The crisis of Western democracy, though, is even more serious than this.

In the United States, long regarded as the home of Western democracy, democratic norms came under growing attack during the Trump presidency. It may be that Joe Biden will restore the country to the status quo ante, but this must remain very doubtful: America is deeply polarized and hopelessly divided. The underlying reason for the break-up of the previous long-running consensus is American decline, a process that will certainly continue and which is likely serve to exacerbate America’s divisions even more.

What Lies Ahead for China?

It is, of course, impossible to foresee the future. To judge by the 2008 financial crisis, which led not only to a shift in power from the US to China but also growing disillusionment in the West’s governing elites and institutions, the impact of the pandemic – which has been a far bigger event than 2008 – will be profound and far-reaching.

The coming decade is likely to see great instability in the West, which will be burdened with a mountain of debt, a young generation which has lost out very badly, large-scale unemployment, a slow recovery, very low growth rates and a big increase in inequality. In such circumstances, it seems likely that Western societies, as during the pandemic, will turn inwards and be consumed by these huge challenges.

In contrast, China has already recovered and is likely to see strong growth over the next few years, culminating in it becoming, by both measures of GDP, the largest economy in the world. Although it remains an unattractive model of governance as far as Western societies are concerned, a combination of its success in handling the pandemic and the crisis of democratic governance in the West will temper these negative sentiments and foster a growing if grudging respect.

The world, in which the developing countries constitute the great majority, will come to regard China as the global leader in multiple aspects – as the leading economy, the biggest contributor to global growth, the largest single market, highly competent governance (if too authoritarian for many in the West), and probably the key leader in the fight against climate change.

Finally, in respect of Europe, we should not underestimate the gravitational pull of China. Although Europe is still largely Atlanticist in outlook, it is increasingly looking eastwards, and this process – complex and uneven as it is – will slowly gather momentum, especially in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative.

L'articolo China After Coronavirus: What are the Economic and Political Scenarios? proviene da InsideOver.