While the world continued sleepwalking into a cold war, from Ukraine to Israel now, the third global summit of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) took place in Beijing on October 17-18.
Based on the participation and the main outcomes, this summit looks very different from the first, which took place in May 2017, or even the second in April 2019.
First, a lot fewer heads of state participated, only 23 this time, down from 37 at the second summit. Second, several of the participants were anti-Western regimes, with Russian President Vladimir Putin as guest of honor.
Another landmark was the presence of Afghanistan’s Taliban. As well, Hungary’s Viktor Orban not only participated as expected (he did not miss either of the previous summits) but also officially declared his opposition to de-risking strategy within the European Union’s economic-security strategy.
At the other end of the political spectrum, no EU member joined the BRI Forum other than Orban, while as many as six and seven respectively joined the 2017 and 2019 summits.
This time around, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also reversed her country’s tradition of joining the first two summits, but she had already made that intention clear in an official announcement at the Group of Twenty meeting in September.
BRI trade played down
Beyond attendance, this summit was different because it has focused much less on improving trade and investment connectivity through building infrastructure and much more on foreign policy. This might be related to China’s increasing disengagement in some of these countries, as least as far as lending and investment in concerned.
China’s much reduced investment globally, including in BRI countries, is probably a consequence of the bad experiences with some of the landing as, reportedly, one-third of BRI projects have run into trouble.
In addition, China’s annual economic growth is only half of what is was in 2012, when Xi Jinping conceived this landmark project. The Chinese economy is struggling with a real-estate collapse and an increasingly heavy debt burden, which makes it difficult to keep funding BRI projects.
On the foreign-policy front, the general theme of the summit was in opposition to those of the United States and its allies. This has important consequences for the war in Ukraine, which the EU and the US have already experienced at the United Nations when voting on Ukraine issues.
The Israel-Gaza conflict is turning into one more reason for the US and China to disagree on foreign policy. In fact, the position that China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made public in the wake of the attacks on Israel is that it was siding is with Palestine given its lack of protection from the West.
More generally, Beijing’s relations with the Global South have become key for China, and for which the BRI is a very useful platform. However, the BRI is not China’s highest-level foreign policy-instrument, as it has been placed below the “global community of shared future,” Xi Jinping’s even broader vision of where China places itself in the world.
Even if foreign policy was in the driving seat, any such summit needs some specific deliverables to claim success. Among the wealth of measures announced – some of which were not necessarily new – a few stand out.
First, both “integrity-based” (which equates to anti-corruption) and “clean” (green) were the key objectives that accompanied most references to the BRI. Second, a global initiative of AI (artificial intelligence) governance was announced.
As for financial resources, two announcements were made, though of a much smaller scale than in the past, namely 350 billion yuan (US$48 billion) worth of additional resources for policy banks, and 80 billion yuan ($11 billion) for the Silk Road Fund.
Finally, there was no relevant announcement of a multilateral framework being created to support BRI projects, so one should expect that the BRI – even with the current inclination toward foreign policy – will remain very much a hub-and-spoke system.
Given all the above, the final question is how important the BRI will remain. According to Beijing’s BRI white paper for the summit, “China will continue to promote the BRI as its overarching plan and its top-level design for opening up and win-win international cooperation.”
Against that backdrop, the BRI is not going away but is transforming itself from an economic to a foreign-policy tool. China can no longer afford financing so much infrastructure in the emerging/developing world.
What matters now to China is political and diplomatic alignment, which implies that the BRI does not need so many members but those in it should be aligned. This is key for pushing common standards and projects that might face opposition from the US and the West more generally.
To conclude, the BRI is becoming one of China’s key instruments to build an increasingly anti-Western agenda. For some, this agenda is a response to the United States’ bipartisan interest in containing China’s rise toward hegemony. For others, China started this race.
What matters the most is to realize where we stand, basically getting closer to a full-fledged cold war.
Alicia Garcia Herrero is senior research fellow at Bruegel. Follow her on X @Aligarciaherrer.