Leading U.S. think tanks including CSIS and international media outlets like the Financial Times have settled on a narrative that the sharp reduction in Chinese overseas development lending provides the clearest evidence to date that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is “pulling back” or being “curtailed.”
But measuring the BRI’s health purely on the basis of Chinese lending patterns misses a lot of important data points that provide insights into the relative strength of Beijing’s global trade agenda, according to leading China development scholar Stella Hong Zhang from George Mason University.
“Even if overseas lending has dropped from previous years, we need to see whether trade and investment flows are following the same trend,” said Zhang in a new article published on Monday. Zhang argues that trade, FDI and diplomatic activity in BRI countries have all increased in the same period that lending has gone down.
Stella Hong Zhang’s Four Layered BRI Pyramid of State & Non-State Actors:
- SENIOR LEADERS: “At the top are the high-level diplomatic engagements leading to the formation of intergovernmental agreements for cooperation. This is also the set of statistics most often used by the Chinese Government when reporting on the progress of the BRI: as of June 2021, 205 documents have been signed with 140 countries and 31 international organizations.”
- BUREAUCRATS: “The second level takes into consideration the more technocratic undertakings regarding trade, investment, financial infrastructure, taxation, customs, standards harmonization, and so on, which involve the relevant central state bureaucracies reaching out to their counterparts in partner countries or proposing new initiatives in international forums with the aim of reshaping the international institutional environment.
“This layer of activities is largely overlooked in international media reports and thus receives little public attention, but it may be where the most substantive international negotiations are taking place.”
- OTHER STATE ACTORS: “The third level is the subnational, where provincial and municipal governments engage in their own economic and cultural diplomacy, depending on their local conditions.”
- INFRASTRUCTURE & INVESTMENT: “The fourth level is what most external discussions about the BRI are focusing on: the infrastructure and investment projects carried out by Chinese companies and financial institutions. While the first three levels are largely activities by state actors, this bottom level sees extensive involvement of non-state market actors as well.”
Read the full article on the People’s Map of Global China website.
