Martin Jacques, Senior Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, UK

Speech at BRSN in Beijing on April 25, 2019

There are three questions I would like to discuss.

The BRI has come a long way in the last two years. One important expression of this is the attitude in the West. The US previously largely ignored it. They pretended it was of no great import or significance. Now they criticise it. Two years ago, most people in the West did not know what BRI was. Now BRI is contested. This is a sign of its growing importance and success. As a result, BRI is now subject to a great deal more public exposure, attention and debate. Rather than being regarded as somewhat remote and obscure, bordering on irrelevant, BRI is now more like a goldfish bowl. China’s role and approach is the subject of growing interest, discussion and criticism. Its role in BRI has become a political football. Everything that it does matters in a new kind of way. It cannot escape the spotlight of attention. This is already clear from those instances where there has been strong popular opposition to various projects. Malaysia is the most recent example, but before that there was Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Such differences are immediately spun, certainly in the West, as evidence that there is popular opposition to BRI and that the projects are in China’s interests but not those of the recipient countries. Every agreement is potentially subject to the glare of publicity. This is not something to be feared or to shy away from. On the contrary we should welcome the opportunity to explain what BRI is about and to take on the arguments. It will demand great diplomatic skill and tact on China’s part, combined with greater openness about projects.

My second point concerns how responsibility for BRI can be broadened. Hitherto BRI has been very much China’s baby. That has been necessary and inevitable. Without China it would never have happened and would not be possible today nor in the future. The purpose of BRI, though, is the transformation of the Eurasian continent. Although the primary relationships are for the most part bilateral, namely between China and other countries, the mission is essentially multilateral and multinational, based on growing connectivity and increasing collaboration. It must be a shared enterprise. That is fundamental to its appeal. One of the challenges for BRI is how over time it can evolve into more of a shared enterprise. In the papers for the last summit in 2017, an organising and coordinating body for developing plans was proposed together with a macro-economic policy coordination body. This is very important: it is one way in which the future direction and approach towards BRI can be shared between the participants. It is very important that the participating countries take ownership of and be responsible for Belt and Road and regard it as a collective endeavour rather than being just China’s problem. Of course, this is a complex question because China is and will remain absolutely fundamental to the whole enterprise. Such a sharing of responsibility could be a powerful factor in attracting new participants, for example those Western European countries that have so far been reluctant to join. A further advantage would be that China would not always be in the firing line for anything and everything that is perceived to go wrong.

The third point concerns the relationship between BRI and the international order. The latter has been changing rapidly and experiencing a growing lack of legitimacy. The underlying reason is the shift of power from the developed to the developing world. The present international order was the creation of a small number of western countries, representing a very small minority of the world’s population, at the end of the Second World War at a time when many countries were still colonies. It is obvious that the present international order is not fit for purpose. China’s approach has rightly been to support the present order while seeking to reform and add to it, with the creation, for example, of new institutions like the AIIB. Notwithstanding this, the international order as constituted today presents us with a profound dilemma; its fundamental lack of representivity is in the longer run unsustainable. 

In this context, the gathering constellation that is Belt and Road offers the world an interesting possibility: namely, a different perspective of how things might be. Belt and Road is primarily a relationship between China and a multitude of developing countries, together representing two-thirds of the world’s population. This is exactly the opposite of the way power is presently distributed in the international order, with the developing world having little say and being hugely under-represented. Of course, BRI is still in its infancy. It is as yet not much more than a growing cluster of bilateral agreements, a biennial summit and various other events. But that will change, probably rapidly. There will be many more bilateral agreements, the growth of trilateral and multilateral agreements, and new kinds of regional organisations. BRI will spawn a process of growing institutionalisation taking a myriad of different forms across a range of different fields, including the organising and coordinating body I mentioned earlier. The lines of communication across the Eurasian land mass are relatively sparse in many parts, a product of the relative under-development of many countries, the weakness of their national governance and their relative isolation and lack of connectivity. Many parts suffer from chronic under-governance. Over time, development will transform this situation and Eurasia will acquire a dense network of multitudinous forms of connectivity. Eurasia will be a model of the way the world can be changed, from development to new forms of governance. 

Eurasia will offer a model of a new kind of international order. It will, of course, not replace the existing international order, but rather suggest what that global order might and could become, embodying a different set of norms and values, and based on mutual respect and the goal of development. In this sense Belt and Road can be the embryo of a future international order.    

DISCLAIMER 

The views expressed in this article are entirely those of the author(s) own, and not those of the Belt and Road Studies Network (BRSN).