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Inside Out & Outside In
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Inside Out | The myth of China’s ‘debt-trap’ diplomacy must be put to bed once and for all

  • The Belt and Road Initiative stems from China’s recognition of its own strategic vulnerability, rather than being aimed at global hegemony
  • Yet the difficulties of managing big infrastructure projects provided traction for the Trump administration’s ‘battle against evil’ narrative

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The scale of Beijing’s ambition, coupled with the difficulties of managing big infrastructure projects in developing economies that are often corrupt or politically unstable, has led to reputation-sapping difficulties – for example over Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port. Photo: Xinhua
David Dodwell

Over the past four years, as part of the Washington’s “Beijing as axis of evil” narrative, there have been persistent attacks on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with repeated claims of “debt-trap” diplomacy intended to build control and influence across the developing world by stealth.

The arrival of the Biden administration in the US hopefully provides a long-overdue opportunity to review this crude and inept narrative fomented by the missionary convictions of Donald Trump’s leadership team, to reconsider the origins, ambitions and impacts of the belt and road plan, and to consider where the plan may go from here.

I had the accidental fortune to be on the ground floor of initial Chinese thinking about the belt and road. It began with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) back in 2009-10, where consensus emerged that one of the primary obstacles to economic progress in the region was the poverty of infrastructure.

The Asian Development Bank, and consultants like McKinsey, quickly provided numbers reflecting the awesome scale of the need: US$8 trillion up to 2020, a figure since updated into US$26 trillion up to 2030. While bringing vital focus onto the urgent need to build infrastructure, the sheer size of the investment challenge intimidated everyone – though I think today, in the wake of the multitrillion-dollar damage done by the global pandemic, and President Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, these numbers no longer seem so astronomical.
The analysis clearly struck a chord with Beijing, given that China’s own massive efforts to build infrastructure – roads, railways, ports, mass transit systems, power generation and 5G telecoms – have quite reasonably been credited with driving much of the country’s growth in recent decades.

As the Chinese looked increasingly outward, at strengthening trade and economic links with the world, protecting their supply chains, and facilitating access to urgently-needed commodities sourced in poor and unstable developing economies across the world, so the need to encourage infrastructure-building internationally became obvious.

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