It’s been a month since the G7 unveiled its new “Build Back Better World” (B3W) initiative that aims to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative by providing an alternative source of infrastructure development financing that is presumably more transparent and sustainable. So far, if the sentiments expressed by Chinese scholars are anything to go by, no one in Beijing really seems that worried.
Hu Zhiyong (胡志勇), a researcher at the influential Institute of International Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said the fact that B3W is so vague that it’s effectively useless. “The B3W proposal failed to put forth any realistic (or feasible) ways to achieve its objectives,” he wrote recently in a column published in the influential Economic Daily newspaper. “The content of the proposal was totally hollow and doesn’t take into account the challenge of building infrastructure in developing countries,” he added.
