11 October 2021, NIICE Commentary 7456
E V A Dissanayake
China’s rise during the past decade has become the key determinant of contemporary international politics. This is just the beginning; and this rising power’s constant efforts to expand into all regions of the world will impact the world order for decades to come. While China keeps expanding its power status in the world through economic intervention, the Western democracies, view it as a threat to democracy and peace, particularly raising concerns over China’s BRI (Belt and Road Initiative).
China’s BRI which was launched in 2013 to improve the connectivity of over 60 percent of the global population in 100 countries of Asia, Europe, and Africa through infrastructure development for economic growth became the largest investment in world history, amounting to more than USD 500 billion. China’s strategy in lending to developing countries, ignoring domestic politics, governance, and democratic norms; positions China as a valuable partner for several poor and developing countries in desperation for investment and loans. Aside from the enormous critics over the indefensible debt, political agenda, and lack of transparency in lending, China pursues a soft power-oriented economic diplomacy through the BRI, and strengthening it through its hard power resources, for its dominant presence in global infrastructure funding.
While the BRI denotes China’s stance in today’s world political agenda, the Western globe considers its lending to the Global South, to be a trap to encroach geostrategic points of interest, through its debt-trap diplomacy. The unsustainable projects, lack of transparency in lending, corruption, and the adverse environmental and social impacts, on the receiving countries, are being seen as factors that brutally impair the prevailing world order. Viewing BRI’s lending as a spreading risk of authoritarianism and non-democracy in the Global South, several Western democratic powers strategized to limit China’s expansion and counter its BRI projects. Thus, emerged the B3W (Build Back Better World) initiative to challenge the BRI, with the aim of countering China’s presence in the anarchic international system. This initiative of the G7 nations in June 2021, coined a new discourse in contemporary politics, breaking the prolonged silence of the Western powers in the game of world power politics. This ‘values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership led by ‘major democracies’ was to help narrow infrastructure need in the developing world, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, B3W’s agenda is questionable, as it involves the big powers of the world which would typically enter into a multilateral initiative for their survival in the international system, and power maximization. These developed powers’ intentions, particularly the US’s intentions would not be to uplift the infrastructure facilities of the developing countries; instead, financial support toward infrastructure development to the countries in the developing world, with flourishing labour has the potential to prompt rapid economic growth for the benefit of the US enterprise which would result in lifting the global economy. This enhancing of the global economy by the US would be a hard knock on China’s economic development expansion.
The shift in global power relations today is playing out through economic aid and infrastructure development – behind which is a hidden political game, to sustain power in the anarchic international system. Hence, the B3W seems to be the traditional political game of powerful nations; providing economic assistance through diverse means to developing countries to enhance their own national security, based on preferences, and to prevent countries of strategic importance from falling under the influence of their rivals.
The big powers from the developed world’s primary concerns are toward the players on the international stage. While the US has always been the only dominant player since the post-Cold War, the international stage which is governed by the Western powers remains unaccustomed to a new player from the Global South. Therefore, the US is extended with support to implement its strongest standpoint using B3W as a means, to prevent an authoritarian player, with remarkable digital surveillance capabilities from acquiring the place of ‘superpower’ in the international sphere, a position that was always held by the US alone. The BRI and the B3W could be beneficial to a large number of global populations; but would they be free of obligations for the developing Global South. The international political game is rarely an equal win-win, but a zero-sum game. The primary players here being the sovereign states, strive in the international anarchic system, to balance their powers, based on their capabilities, which affects the countries of the Global South, and not necessarily the North.
While China’s BRI might be a probable danger for the countries of the Global South, who are caught in a severe economic trap, the B3W is never going to befall them without crafting strong implications for them. To the developing countries of the Global South, both the B3W and the BRI, are undoubtedly two sides of a political coin, which when turned to whichever side, potentially holds indefinite harm on them.
E V A Dissanayake is an Independent Researcher from Sri Lanka.
