And how that would affect India: Journalist Bertil Lintner’s new work offers answers
The End of the Chinese Century? : How Xi Jinping Lost the Belt and Road Initiative
By Bertil Lintner
HarperColins, 256 pages, Rs 499.00
The Belt and Road Initiative, when first unveiled by Xi Jinping in 2013, was envisioned as even bigger and grander than America’s Marshall Plan. Famously referred to as the ‘New Silk Route’, it proposed an overland ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ connecting China with Europe through Central Asia and the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ that the Chinese claim existed in ancient times across the Indian Ocean. The BRI would not only restore China’s glory as a global trading nation, but also establish its status as the world leader, overtaking the United States.
A decade later, not everyone in Asia and the Pacific shares Xi’s visions of a China-dominated future. Countries like Sri Lanka and Laos have fallen into Chinese debt traps due to the loans they took as part of the BRI, in others like Thailand and Central Asian republics, Chinese investment is unwelcome; and in some, like Pakistan, the opposition to China’s forays has been outright violent.
In ‘The End of the Chinese Century?’, journalist Bertil Lintner takes the reader through the history of the BRI and China’s global expansionist plans. He casts and expert eye on the once-much-vaunted project’s future and what its failure might mean for the ‘Chinese Century’ – and how that would affect India, which continues to be a counterpoint to China on the world stage.
Bertil Lintner is a Swedish journalist, author and strategic consultant who has been writing about Asia for nearly four decades. He was formerly the Myanmar correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review and Asia correspondent for the Swedish daily, Svenska Dagbladet, and Denmark’s Politiken. He currently works as a correspondent for Asia Times. He has written extensively about Myanmar, India, China and North Korea in various local, national and international publications of over thirty countries. He mainly writes about organized crime, ethnic and political insurgencies and regional security. He has published several books, including China’s India War and Great Game East. In 2004, Lintner received an award for excellence in reporting about North Korea from the Society of Publishers in Asia and, in 2014, another award from the same society for writing about religious conflicts in Myanmar.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
When almost the entire population in Myanmar in 1988 rose up against a dictatorship that had held the country in an iron grip for more than two decades, the Executive Intelligence Review and the Lyndon LaRouche movement were alone in defending the country’s ruling military after its troops had opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators, killing at least 3,000 people. According to the Executive Intelligence Review, the uprising was a plot instigated by the US and the UK to destabilize Myanmar.
Lyndon LaRouche’s widow Helga Zepp-LaRouche now heads the organization, which has adopted the more innocuous-sounding name the International Schiller Institute. She appears to be spending most of her time in China, where she takes part in government-sponsored conferences and television talk shows. An item on the institute’s website describes her importance to China’s BRI: ‘Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and president of the International Schiller Institute, is right in the middle of the action in Beijing during the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. This comes after decades of leadership by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche for just this kind of mobilization for worldwide development. Since the 1990s, and Zepp-LaRouche’s first participation in an international conference in China, where she called for a “Eurasian Land-Bridge,” she has become widely known as the Silk Road Lady.’ On the Asian Times website, Goldman, a.k.a. ‘Spengler’, has been promoting the concept of a ‘Pax Sinica’, or efforts by China to establish world peace. Parpart’s main contributions have been stories about Ukraine, how Russia will win the war and the follies of the policies of the West, which supports Ukraine.
But the war in Ukraine is not going well for Russia and has disrupted all Chinese attempts to establish a ‘new Silk Road’ through Central Asia, which is of symbolic significance because it is, supposedly, the original route. The Covid-19 pandemic and Beijing’s decision to take severe, but, as it turned out, ineffectual measures to contain the spread of the disease including shutting down the entire country for nearly two years, has also had a profound impact on the economy. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no way China will be able to live up to the promises Xi made when he launched the BRI in 2013. A sixth threat to the BRI can now be added to Wang Yiwei’s list: unexpected health crises.
China’s domestic problems also became clear during the twentieth congress of the CPC, which was held in Beijing from 16 to 22 October 2022. Xi secured a third term as China’s top leader.91 Xi was re-elected and his proposals accepted unanimously by all 2,296 delegates with no abstentions. But as Bonny Lin and Joel Wuthnow pointed out in Foreign Affairs on 20 November 2022: ‘The façade of a confident and robust Xi masked deep anxiety. Xi sees China hemmed in on all sides and facing intensifying security threats. This anxiety is driven by Beijing’s perception of a hostile Washington, its problematic relations with its neighbours, and the fact that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army still has a long way to go to become a force capable of fighting and winning local wars—never mind larger conflicts.’
Gone, wrote Lin and Wuthnow, is the upbeat assessment from the previous 2017 party congress, which concluded that China enjoys a favourable external environment for development. Now, ‘risks and challenges are concurrent and uncertainties and unforeseen factors are rising.’ Xi’s report to the congress does not specifically mention the US, but his hints are clear. The US is the enemy because of its support for Taiwan and security arrangements with Japan, Australia, India and the UK—and that is a perception China shares with Russia, which is fighting a war in Ukraine against troops armed by the US and other Western democracies. The leaders of China as well as Russia feel that they are being encircled by the West, and share a common interest in resisting what they see as a threat to their national security interests.
When Xi met Putin at the opening of the Winter Olympics in China in February 2022, he emphasized the strategic relationship between China and Russia and their shared vision of a ‘new international order based on their view of human rights and democracy.’ Xi reaffirmed that commitment when he met Putin in Moscow in March 2023. Xi reportedly told Putin: ‘Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years and we are driving this change together.’ But that ‘new order’ will be one built on myths and lies, like those about the multitude of newly created ‘Silk Roads’ and other rewritings of history.
At the same time, the China–Russia pact is more of a marriage of convenience than an equal, genuine partnership. The Chinese have not forgotten that old tsars stripped China of vast territories in the Far East in the nineteenth century, and now Russia is the weaker partner in a shaky relationship where China is gaining the upper hand. Chinese maps still show Chinese names for Russian cities like Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk, and the Russians have not protested openly against that.
Furthermore, the leaders in Beijing are not unaware of their troubled relationship with several of their other neighbours. There are territorial disputes on land and on sea with India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Rising anti-Chinese sentiments in the Central Asian republics, Fiji and—among the public—in Myanmar, cannot have escaped the attention of Beijing’s security planners either. Those concerns and economic setbacks, coupled with the effects of not having any proper organizational structure for the BRI, are likely to force China to downscale the BRI, and the most probable alternative to the grand, once-global plan will be projects in countries closer to home such as Myanmar, Laos, Pakistan and the Pacific-island nations. The war in Ukraine will also force China to focus on the resource-rich Russian Far East rather than trying to promote trade across Central Asia. Squeezed in the middle will be not only weaker nations but also local communities in those countries who will end up as pawns in a global power game over which they will have no influence.
[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]