Can the West Devise an Alternative to China's Belt and Road?
Hillman said the timing is right for advanced economies to offer alternatives to the BRI that can focus on providing more transparency for higher-quality projects across the developing world.
With their combined resources and a growing convergence among allies on how to approach development, especially Brussels and Washington, Western infrastructure plans could receive a boost that they’ve recently lacked.
“The United States is now much more aligned with its European partners when it comes to environmental issues, and that creates more opportunity for collaboration,” said Hillman. “There is a heft and confidence behind these talks that wasn’t there before.”
A Window of Opportunity
The current push comes as the developing world struggles with the economic pressures brought by the pandemic and as the BRI brand has been tarnished by controversy.
The World Bank has said that COVID-19 will plunge the world economy into the worst recession since World War II and the world’s infrastructure needs — estimated at $94 trillion over the next two decades — are still unmet.
The BRI has also been undercut in recent years with questions regarding the commercial value of many of its projects, growing debt worries over murky lending practices, and concerns over the initiative being a vehicle for Chinese control.
Montenegro asked the European Union in April for help repaying a $1 billion Chinese loan for an ongoing highway project in that small Balkan country.
Debt and transparency concerns also surfaced in May as Hungary announced a $1.5 billion loan to build a Chinese university. This followed a controversial move by the government in April 2020 to keep all details classified around $1.9 billion borrowed from China for a railway project connecting Budapest to Belgrade.
Wider aspersions have been cast on the terms of deals for BRI projects, which a recent study of 100 Chinese contracts by the Center for Global Development found contained uniquely restrictive secrecy requirements and clauses that could allow Chinese entities to influence the policies of debtor countries.
“The shine is now gone from the [BRI],” Theresa Fallon, the director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels, told RFE/RL. “Positions towards China have been hardening and this is a chance for Europe to start thinking more strategically in their own neighborhood and beyond.”
The terms of what a Western alternative could look like are still being discussed but will likely seek to build off past agreements and rely on a mix of public and private funds.
The European Union launched a connectivity plan in 2018 and signed a deal with Japan in 2019 in what former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called a “sustainable, rules-based connectivity from the Indo-Pacific to the Western Balkans and Africa.”
The United States also passed the Build Act in 2018, which is intended to boost investment from the private sector in the developing world, and also launched the Blue Dot Network with Japan and Australia in 2019 as a way to uphold standards for infrastructure projects.
None of the initiatives, however, has yielded much in terms of concrete results, raising concerns that the West is unable to offer a true alternative to the state-backed economic vision put forward by Xi.
According to Fallon, Western nations should not be focusing on matching Beijing in terms of the volume of financing, but should instead be looking to use an infrastructure push to help spread higher standards for executing projects and integrating more transparency into contract negotiations.
“Simply being present on the ground already increases the leverage on China by making them have to improve what they offer and be more transparent in order to compete,” said Fallon.
A Patchwork of Projects
While efforts to come up with alternatives to the BRI are gaining steam, they also face growing obstacles.
Western countries currently lack a centralized point to coordinate infrastructure partnerships. This makes it unlikely that one unified initiative to rival the BRI will materialize. Instead, analysts say, any future Western initiatives are likely to remain a mix of separate but coordinated projects between various players like the United States, the European Union, Japan, and India.
“The shine is now gone from the [BRI],” Theresa Fallon, the director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels, told RFE/RL. “Positions towards China have been hardening and this is a chance for Europe to start thinking more strategically in their own neighborhood and beyond.”
The terms of what a Western alternative could look like are still being discussed but will likely seek to build off past agreements and rely on a mix of public and private funds.
The European Union launched a connectivity plan in 2018 and signed a deal with Japan in 2019 in what former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called a “sustainable, rules-based connectivity from the Indo-Pacific to the Western Balkans and Africa.”
The United States also passed the Build Act in 2018, which is intended to boost investment from the private sector in the developing world, and also launched the Blue Dot Network with Japan and Australia in 2019 as a way to uphold standards for infrastructure projects.
None of the initiatives, however, has yielded much in terms of concrete results, raising concerns that the West is unable to offer a true alternative to the state-backed economic vision put forward by Xi.
According to Fallon, Western nations should not be focusing on matching Beijing in terms of the volume of financing, but should instead be looking to use an infrastructure push to help spread higher standards for executing projects and integrating more transparency into contract negotiations.
“Simply being present on the ground already increases the leverage on China by making them have to improve what they offer and be more transparent in order to compete,” said Fallon.
While efforts to come up with alternatives to the BRI are gaining steam, they also face growing obstacles.
Western countries currently lack a centralized point to coordinate infrastructure partnerships. This makes it unlikely that one unified initiative to rival the BRI will materialize. Instead, analysts say, any future Western initiatives are likely to remain a mix of separate but coordinated projects between various players like the United States, the European Union, Japan, and India.
Reid Standish is a correspondent for RFE/RL focused on China in Eurasia.This article is reprinted with permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
