As OBOR faces more hurdles, Xi may be eyeing another rebranding

FORUM Staff

Nearly a decade after it was unveiled with much fanfare, Beijing’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure scheme continues to trail controversy in its path, prompting speculation that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping is attempting yet another rebranding of his troubled signature policy as he wrestles with unprecedented domestic challenges.

During an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in mid-November 2022, Xi called for building an “Asia-Pacific community with a shared future,” according to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) state-controlled media. He said the 21-member forum must “strengthen coordination on macroeconomic policies, forge more closely linked regional supply and industrial chains … and steadily advance regional economic integration,” among other measures.

“In Xi’s vision of an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future, China is the ‘hub,’ connecting with each individual nation in a hub-and-spokes model of a distributed supply chain network,” Dr. Marina Yue Zhang, an associate professor at the Australia-China Relations Institute of the University of Technology Sydney, wrote in the online news magazine The Diplomat in early December 2022.

A similar description often is applied to OBOR, which CCP official propaganda sought to repackage as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) after the transcontinental program hit a multitude of potholes, with the World Bank and other agencies citing risks to participating nations such as crippling debt to Chinese lenders, cost overruns, shoddy workmanship, corruption, environmental damage and loss of sovereignty.

Indo-Pacific nations including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Maldives have scrapped, scaled down or renegotiated OBOR projects over such concerns. In early 2022, with their nation’s economy tumbling toward a default, Sri Lankan leaders implored Chinese officials to restructure Colombo’s debt payments. Analysts pointed to the troubling case of Hambantota Port on the Indian Ocean, an OBOR project built with Chinese funding that came under a Chinese state-owned company’s control when Sri Lanka struggled to make loan payments.

Beijing’s rewrapping of OBOR under a new name has failed to assuage fears that the scheme is a Trojan horse — a proffer of developmental assistance that is merely a conveyance for expanding the PRC’s political and military influence, with ports such as Hambantota potentially allowing Chinese naval vessels access without oversight by local authorities. Days before Xi addressed APEC leaders in Bangkok, Thailand, Chinese officials were scrambling to dismiss reports of mass protests centering on an OBOR project in southwest Pakistan, according to India’s The Economic Times newspaper.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), launched in 2015, was touted as a U.S. $62 billion, 3,000-kilometer network of road and rail links, industrial zones and pipelines connecting the Xinjiang region in northwest China to the Pakistani fishing town of Gwadar, giving the Chinese government access to strategically important Arabian Sea trade routes.

The PRC’s construction of a deep-sea port at Gwadar has plunged the community into chaos, with widespread demonstrations and threatened blockades over Chinese influence in local government, heightened security and Chinese trawlers choking off livelihoods in fishing communities, The Economic Times reported in November 2022. (Pictured: Pakistan Navy personnel stand guard while a Chinese cargo ship readies to leave port in Gwadar in 2016.)

The discontent had been bubbling to the surface.

“Gwadar port has long been portrayed as the jewel in the CPEC crown, but in the process the city has become the very embodiment of a security state,” Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper noted in a late 2021 editorial. “Far from the port being a harbinger of an economic boom, the opposite has happened. Existing privations have deepened; people’s mobility is restricted by security forces and there is unwarranted questioning of their activities. Many say they are made to feel like strangers in their own land.”

As civil unrest persisted in Gwadar, historic protests erupted in cities and on university campuses across the PRC over the regime’s drastic coronavirus restrictions. The protests, which included calls for Xi to resign just weeks after he secured a third five-year term as head of the party, were the largest in the PRC in years and appear to have influenced officials to ease lockdowns and mass testing.

Beijing’s “zero-COVID” tactics have also buffeted the Chinese economy, with factories and businesses frequently shuttered to blunt the virus’s spread. Meanwhile, democracies worldwide are decoupling their economies and supply chains from the PRC, prompted in part by the CCP’s growing belligerence in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, its human rights abuses and forced labor practices in Xinjiang, and its punitive trade practices.

The swirl of challenges confronting Xi also places OBOR in peril, according to “Delivering the Belt and Road,” a December 2022 report by AidData, a research lab at the College of William & Mary in the United States. “It faces major headwinds: economic slowdown and negative publicity, with a spate of borrowing countries in debt distress as they struggle to repay loans.”

Another makeover can’t conceal such blemishes.

“There are several reasons that, for the foreseeable future, it will not be feasible for Xi to realize his vision of building an Asia-Pacific community, at least at the governance level,” Zhang wrote in The Diplomat. “First, most of China’s Asian neighbors have accepted the U.S.-led world order of freedom and democracy. A rising China with an authoritarian regime is perceived as a security challenge to those countries.”

IMAGE CREDIT: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS