Making (limited) inroads: Why China's Belt and Road struggles to deliver goodwill

This article was written as part of a collection of essays contained in the 2019 Soft Power 30 report, examining various aspects of changing global soft power. To read the report go to softpower30.com/. This years report (pdf) is available here.

By James Crabtree

Dozens of world leaders flocked to China’s second Belt and Road Forum in April this year, hosted in the Sunrise Kempinski, a luxurious golf-ballshaped hotel next to a lake in Beijing’s northern suburbs. Yet although this grand gathering aimed to showcase successes of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), its opening actually came at a moment of growing doubt over President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy venture.

Since launching in 2013, China has ploughed hundreds of billions of dollars into BRI, using infrastructure as a tool to recreate the trading routes that historically criss-crossed Eurasia. The project’s architects hoped goodwill would follow, with investment in hard assets helping the country become a soft power giant too.

For all that money, in the year prior to this year’s forum it seemed the opposite might be happening. BRI’s railway, port, and power projects often left their hosts mired in debt, critics suggested. Recipient nations worried about corruption, as well as the fact that China’s mega-projects tended to be built by Chinese workers and run by Chinese state-owned enterprises, creating few jobs for local people or businesses. As the political backlash over BRI grew, China’s leadership faced an alarming question: might BRI in fact be damaging China’s standing abroad, rather than enhancing it?

In the sense coined by Harvard’s Joseph Nye, countries value soft power because it makes them attractive. Rather than using coercion, national aims can be pushed via a mix of culture, values, and foreign policies — all of which can persuade others to act in ways that advance a given country’s own interests. 

Chinese strategists hope BRI will foster this kind of goodwill in three respects. First, glitzy infrastructure helps position China as a technicallyimpressive development partner: a nation with its own impressive development record, but also one that is generous and willing to help others.

The scale of BRI’s projects then reflect a second factor, namely the successes of China’s state-led autocratic model, sometimes dubbed the “Beijing consensus”. This in turn helps to build perceptions of Beijing’s inevitable rise as Asia’s leading power, and one destined to surpass the United States.

Finally, at a deeper cultural level, the idea of building a “new silk road” was designed to awaken a shared cultural and historical memory, linking China to other countries in Asia that did once share the ancient silk road trading routes, and the prosperity they brought.

Although the vast majority of BRI’s budgets are spent on infrastructure, its planners did tack on various softer elements, including cultural and “people-to-people” exchanges. Beijing’s Tsinghua University even launched a 1-year masters degree about BRI, designed to persuade elites in participant nations about the wisdom of the programme.

At its best this was a powerful combination. Public opinion polls in Pakistan, perhaps the largest recipient of BRI cash, suggest that China is viewed overwhelmingly positively, in part because of its generous spending. The same is true in others, according to Thomas Trikasih Lembong, an advisor to Indonesia’s President Jokowi. “The gravitational pull of China’s size and economic capability are virtually irresistible for smaller countries," he said in a recent speech in Singapore.

Yet for all that, BRI’s record at building soft power more generally remains mixed. For every country like Pakistan, there are others like Myanmar whose populations remain deeply hostile to Beijing, despite similarly generous levels of Chinese investment. As well as debt, BRI projects are associated with waste, inefficiency, and cronyism, with contracts controlled by well-connected political insiders.

Over recent years, opposition parties in countries like Malaysia and Sri Lanka have won elections in part by accusing their governments of being in China’s pocket. Theorists of soft power also point to the pulling power of culture and ideas, from America’s democratic principles to Bollywood movies or K-Pop bands — all hard things to create by state diktat.

A few years ago, President Xi suggested that China’s “underlying values hold greater appeal than ever before.” Yet despite the cultural window dressing, BRI remains at heart a hulking state-directed leviathan, and one that has done little to soften China’s harsh international image. 

Add all these doubts together, and in the run up to the second BRI forum, some observers wondered whether BRI might in fact be harming China’s reputation. Minxin Pei, a respected Beijing-watcher at Claremont McKenna College, even went as far as to predict that Xi would at first downplay and then eventually abandon his pet plan.

There were few signs of this during April's forum, however, which won positive reviews, both for its line-up of dignitaries and the plethora of new mega deals it unveiled. More than that, the gathering suggested China’s leadership had begun to acknowledge some of BRI’s perceived shortcoming

Speaking at the event, Xi announced a range of measures to reform its operation, including new rules to ensure projects did not come at excessive debt or environmental costs. International financial institutions like the World Bank would be invited to participate in projects.

BRI’s next five years would involve a greater cultural focus, helping to “deepen cooperation in education, science, culture, sports, tourism, health, and archaeology,” the Chinese leader said. Whether any of these changes are actually enacted, and whether they can then begin to deliver on BRI’s soft power potential, is harder to judge. China’s infrastructure investments might even take a harder, militaristic turn in future, acting as a precursor for the People’s Liberation Army.

In such a scenario, commercial port investments might morph gradually into extraterritorial Chinese naval bases. Even if that does not happen, turning BRI into something capable of winning hearts and minds will require far-reaching changes to its model, with the aim of creating a more open, transparent, and ultimately more trustworthy endeavour. But until that does happen, the odds are that BRI will generate less soft power than Chinese leaders will have hoped.

James Crabtree is an associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is author of "The Billionaire Raj."