{"id":9258,"date":"2022-01-11T07:30:04","date_gmt":"2022-01-11T07:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=9258"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:45:19","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T09:45:19","slug":"how-has-the-uks-stance-towards-the-belt-and-road-initiative-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/how-has-the-uks-stance-towards-the-belt-and-road-initiative-changed\/","title":{"rendered":"How has the UK’s stance towards the Belt and Road Initiative changed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UK has done well through partnering with China on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) before, but is it now considering extricating itself from further BRI collaboration with Beijing to align itself with the US or the EU? Joe Cash<\/strong> investigates<\/h2>\n

A global contest is brewing. China, the US, and the EU are all vying for influence along routes that Beijing first turned its attention to in 2013 when President Xi announced his Belt and Road Initiative<\/a> (BRI), that would bring the ancient Silk Road into the present day. It hasn\u2019t always been this way. In the years preceding the outbreak of Covid-19, cooperation was the name of the game when it came to the BRI. In 2019, while attending the BRI Forum in Beijing, Britain\u2019s then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, came close to signing a Memorandum of Understanding that would have given Beijing Britain\u2019s backing. Fast forward to the present day, and the US is spearheading the creation of the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative within the G7, while the EU has unveiled plans to launch a \u201cGlobal Gateway\u201d scheme.<\/p>\n

So how does Britain fit in? And why is a country that once called the BRI \u201can extraordinarily ambitious vision\u201d now debating whether it would be better throwing its lot in with Brussels and Washington<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\"launchpad<\/a><\/p>\n

Background<\/h4>\n

The BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR), is one of the main load-bearing pillars of the Xi administration\u2019s foreign policy. A diverse portfolio of overseas investment and construction projects rolled into a new, China-led model for interactions between countries, combined with a channel through which to transfer Chinese overcapacity, the BRI certainly is, as Phillip Hammond once noted, \u201ca project of truly epic ambition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stretching from China into Europe and traversing the continents of Central Asia, Africa, and the Arctic, China uses the investments its state-owned banks and companies makes along the route of the BRI to deepen its access and influence on the world stage, particularly in the Global South. Chinese banks and corporations have made over $2 trillion in foreign direct investments since 2005. The Trump administration worked hard to brand these investments as part of a \u201cpredatory lending programme\u201d or a \u201cdebt trap,\u201d but this claim has been widely refuted.<\/p>\n

The prevailing view among scholars studying the BRI and how it fits into China\u2019s new globalism is that there is no such \u201cdebt trap,\u201d nor is China doing anything untoward to exploit the countries once its firms have invested. Research shows that China has never actually seized an asset from any country owing funds and that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans. As such, the prevailing motivation behind the West\u2019s increasing desire to provide an alternative is to halt the spread of the \u2018China option.\u2019<\/p>\n

If that is the case, then the clock is ticking, and China has a clear first-mover advantage. Chinese companies have become more professional in their dealings overseas. Meanwhile, the governments of the countries within which Chinese entities focus their investments seem to find the alternative financial and legal institutions that are being set up in parallel to the Bretton Woods system, to handle BRI disputes, to be very appealing. Distinguishable by their informality, ad hoc design, and preference for soft law over systematic formal rules, whether China plans to align its terms and conditions with international (read: Americanised) best practices remains unclear.<\/p>\n