One Belt, One Road To Rule Them All

IT IS NOT just General Secretary Xi Jinping’s ‘Thought’ that has been inscribed in the Party’s constitution. So, too, has his grand vision and signature policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, or OBOR for its original designation, One Belt One Road.

This will give political longevity to the ambitious scheme Xi announced in 2013 to transverse the Eurasia landmass and beyond with a network of roads, railways, ports, pipelines and other infrastructure projects carrying China’s surplus industrial and services capacity westwards and food and energy resources in the opposite direction. Opposing or obstructing it, just as with opposing or obstructing Xi, will henceforth equate with betraying the Party itself.

Few, if any infrastructure projects can boast either such prestige or protection. As Xi indicated at the Party Congress just concluded, OBOR will be central to China’s development until at least 2050, the date Xi has set by which China is to be a leading global power (neatly coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949).

So great is the ambition of this combination of commerce, construction and capital that it is impossible to put an accurate cost or timetable on it.

Bloomberg counts more than $500 million the China has so far spent or committed to OBOR. There is a $40 billion Silk Road Fund and much of the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be directed towards it. No doubt some of the $300 billion National Pension Fund will find its way to OBOR projects as will investment from state-owned banks and enterprises and dutifully patriotic private companies.

The US investment bank Morgan Stanley has suggested that $1.2 trillion will be spent on OBOR-related infrastructure over the next decade. However, so loosely is it defined and so ambitious its scope that you can just about put any price tag on it, as long as it is in the many trillions.

Beijing lists 68 countries as OBOR partners spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Oceania. They already account for one-third of global GDP and trade, two-thirds of the population and one-quarter of global foreign direct investment. The management consultancy McKinsey & Co.reckons they will contribute 80% of global economic growth and add 3 billion to the global middle class by 2050. Any number is going to be large.

For all the trillions of dollars of hard infrastructure that will be built — and as we have noted before, if even only a fraction of what is being talked about gets completed, it will still be huge — OBOR is also a geopolitical project. Whether you see that as 21st-century merchant hegemony writ large or the world’s largest platform for regional collaboration and future engine of trade and investment growth, there can be little argument that it will potentially give Beijing vast sway over a large part of the world.

It is a part of the world with lots of risks, however, both geopolitical and financial. One measure of both is that state-owned insurer China Export & Credit Insurance Corp. said it has paid out $1.7 billion in claims since 2013 on $480 billion of exports and investments it has insured in OBOR countries. The sort of risks the insurer covers are things like government seizures, nationalisation and political violence.

More than half of China’s outward OBOR investment since 2013 has been in countries whose sovereign credit rating is below investment grade — ‘junk’ in the jargon. Of the 68 OBOR countries, only 27 of them are not rated as junk.

It is easy to assume that the Chinese state and its own and private (and dutifully patriotic) companies will be pouring a lot of good money after bad. However, many of the OBOR countries have trade and growth potential that can be released by infrastructure development, especially on the scale and interconnectedness envisaged. That would generate some of the growth necessary to provide some return on the investment.

It will also give China a huge sphere of influence far beyond its near abroad, in which today’s superpowers will be marginalised.

The ‘America First’ economic and political nationalism of the Trump administration, which has caused the stalling of the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and disengaged the ‘Asian pivot’ of its predecessor Obama administration, has given Beijing an unexpected window of opportunity to advance OBOR and its alternative arrangements to those that have governed the international order in the era since World War II.