Everyone, it seems, is writing books on China. And why not? After all, Beijing remains the only genuine challenger to U.S. hegemony and is, we have long been told, “rising.”
This voluminous body of literature on all things Sino (which fattens each year) makes Bruno Maçães’s achievement all the more impressive. If it’s easy to write a book on China, it’s difficult write a good one on it. Maçães has gone one better and written an excellent book. And he succeeds because he does something different yet vital: He analyzes China through the lens of “Belt and Road,” its most ambitious project of modern times.
Belt and Road is a phrase often heard but rarely understood. But understand it we must, because if it succeeds (and it may not, certainly in its entirety at least) it will be a once-in-a-century geopolitical initiative. It is nothing less than a network of Chinese-dominated trade routes designed to smother Eurasia.
Maçães makes clear from the outset, in lucid and compelling prose, that this is the project’s goal. Belt and Road is above all else a symptom of China’s final embrace of superpowerdom—its realization that, as Maçães writes, it is “capable of remaking the world economy and attracting other countries to its own economic orbit and ideological model.”
The shift in geopolitical outlook cannot be overestimated. China’s brutal reformer Deng Xiaoping massacred students at Tiananmen Square while he modernized his country and lifted millions out of poverty. His chosen method (economically at least) was one that would once have been considered heretical: imitation of the West. Deng dragged China into the 20th century; he made it a market economy and created a huge middle class. The national choice became simple: Re-education camps or color TVs. But his foreign policy always rested on the principles of tao guang yang hui, or keeping a low profile.
With Xi Jinping now at the helm, those days are gone. Xi understands that the United States has pretty much abandoned any pretension to shape the world in its image. Like nature, Beijing abhors a vacuum, and it has decided to fill the Washington-shaped hole in international affairs. Belt and Road is unambiguously a project for a new world order. As Maçães writes:
The global economy is less a level playing field than an organized system in which some countries occupy privileged positions and others, such as China, try to rise to these commanding heights. It was always like that, as you will be told in Beijing. The difference is that now someone else is inching closer to the center. The Belt and Road is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart.
So if Belt and Road is about cementing Chinese power globally, how does it seek to do it practically? The answer is, superficially at least, trade. Maçães asks us to imagine Belt and Road as “nine arrows crisscrossing Eurasia [the land mass comprising Europe and Asia, stretching from Lisbon to Shanghai] in all directions: six economic corridors on land and three sea routes whose final goal is to create a new global economy and place China at its center.”
This means a system of variegated trade networks strafing the world: a kind of 21st-century Silk Road (the ancient network of trade routes that connected East and West and was immortalized in the works of the explorer Marco Polo). China is putting together nothing less than an “interconnected system of transport, energy and digital infrastructure [that] would gradually develop into industrial clusters and free trade zones and then an economic corridor spanning construction, logistics, energy, manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, culminating in the birth of a large Eurasian common market.” To put it more simply: Chinese in. Americans out.
Of course, as Maçães notes, the Chinese couch the project in more genteel terms. “Win-win” is the mantra. China has overcapacity in several areas, steel and fertilizers to name just two. So what should it do? Well, Belt and Road provides the answer. For steel, it creates markets abroad by investing in infrastructure. For fertilizers it supplies countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, which have longstanding needs for a reliable supply of phosphate.
Maçães quotes Huang Libin, an official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: “For us there is overcapacity,” he says, “but for the countries along the Belt and Road, or for other BRIC nations, they don’t have enough and if we shift it out. . . .it will be a win-win situation.”
Maybe. But then again maybe not. As Maçães observes, China has emerged as a threat to a Western rules-based global order and “the Belt and Road is now often described as a dagger aimed at the heart of our economies and societies.”
That’s the thing: Once you start with trade and financial flows—or with giving countries what they sorely lack—cultural and political influence surely follows. And that is to say nothing of the military aspect to all this: China is unashamedly building dual-use ports able to berth both cargo ships and military vessels, just as it opens its first overseas bases in Djibouti and—imminently—Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
This is the brilliance implicit within Belt and Road, indeed what forms its very basis. At its heart is Deng’s vision of a “world organized as a network,” in this case of production chains. In understanding that power would eventually drift from rigid hierarchies like media monoliths or even governments to (now digitally-created and enhanced) networks, Deng, as both an autocrat and a hyper-capitalist, was in more ways than one ahead of his time.
The West is now waking up to the threat that Belt and Road poses both economically and geopolitically. Germany and France now talk of it as a hegemonic Chinese project. In Washington, Donald Trump rails more generally against China, but former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also raised specific concerns about Belt and Road, describing it as “a Faustian pact by which countries sacrificed their independence for cheap loans.”
He may well be right. “Whoever is able to build and control the infrastructure linking the two ends of Eurasia will rule the world,” writes Maçães. In his view, this will be China. It’s a fascinating, intriguing and terrifying story, and Maçães tells it superbly. One can only hope, for our sake, that it does not become reality.