I strongly suggest you have another good look at BRI, which may change your mind.
BRI is the most ambitious infrastructure plan that humanity will see. Since the dawn of civilization, human has been dreaming of traveling freely on the Eurasia - a road between Rome and China on which Plato and Laotian can meet. This is the time to build it. Certainly there will be a lot of doubt but from what I can see it is no more ambitious than building the Great Wall on the mountain ridge over thousands kilometers with ancient technology. If you look at Chinese history, one can clearly see that 2 grandest building projects were infrastructure projects-the Great Wall and the Great Canal.
In the past 400 years, Europeans have been responsible for pushing the boundary for humanity in terms of technology and infrastructure development. I think it is the time for China to contribute and push the boundary of what we can achieve. It doesn’t have to be complete in one generation, it can span as many generations as required, just like the Great Wall.
Another aspect is that the land branch of BRI will be a key enabler for the rejuvenation of land power, which has been dominated by the western maritime powers over the last 500 years. Maritime transport will still be the most economical means of transportation and handle lion share of global fright but the large scale deployment of new land transportation technology e.g. high speed rail and highway network, have put the land transport back into the competition.
Industrial investment and development is another centerpiece of BRI, which tends to be overlooked. The work on Rail, highway, port and airport are merely laying the foundations and the end goal of BRI is really about economical development and industrialization. This is where many observers would question China’s motivation of helping other developing nations to achieve industrialization. They think China uses this as smokescreen to hide its real agenda. I’d argue this suspicion is partially due to their biased understanding of capitalism and industrialization as a form of production that is mainly driven by individual entrepreneurs and free market.
Individual entrepreneurship and free market do certainly contribute significantly to the capitalism and industrialization, together with other elements like technology, labor, land and legal framework to protect private ownership but two other critical elements: physical infrastructure that makes the transportation of raw material and production efficiently and a market for the products. A key concepts here are purchasing power of the market and role of state in capitalism.
The model of traditional capitalist countries have been built on a very cruel way of production, extracting raw material from colonies and selling the finished goods back. For the countries that they could not colonize, they would force them to open the market by military means. This will rapidly dominate the local market of the developing countries as their products tend to be far more competitive due to mass production and technology. As a result, the local economy would be destroyed as the people who were in the old production mode lose livelihood and their purchase power. Over time, the purchasing power of the local market diminishes but traditional capitalists will continue their practice despite the overall value of economy has vastly reduced. They will “extract” all the value from local market, at certain point the value of the market will be so low that there is no purchasing power left i,e. people can afford to buy anything from the capitalist countries despite they want to as they have no income. The purchasing power may not go down any further as there’s always certain class that benefits from this cycle and still have some purchasing power for themselves, but they are minority. Now the developing country is in a equilibrium or slow growth state as there’s still natural growth from other aspects like population growth. The capitalists have to move on to the next country and repeat the same thing. However this is not a sustainable model because at certain point all the developing countries would reach this equilibrium stage so the capitalist countries run out of new markets to exploit. They can continue enjoying their high living standard in this equilibrium but there is little new prospect to grow. This is more or less likely what we are having today.
China has been practicing capitalism for the past 4 decades and already have a good understanding of it and where it is heading to.
I believe the reason China comes up BRI is that they like to achieve a new form of capitalism - sustainable capitalism, in which they will help the developing countries to grow their economy and achieve industrialization. As a result of this, The developing countries will have far greater purchasing power than the current state, which means they will be able to buy products from China and vice versa. The new market will stimulate further economical growth in China and it will invest back and the cycle goes on. As a result, China and the rest of the world will enter a sustainable model of growth that will unleash further industry revolution and new technologies.
One may wonder why western countries would have done this if all above makes sense and this brings us to the second key elements in capitalism - state. The western countries have been doing this on a piecemeal basis but state is too fragmented to implement this at a national level. US despite its power and resources wouldn’t be interested in something as tremendous as this. China’s state has the size and willpower to actually implement this as a national strategy on a prolonged basis.
An Interesting thought is that it may lead us to ultimate goal that communism was inspired to achieve - a shared prosperity of humanity. It shall be seen.
The infrastructure projects are to employ Chinese labor, Chinese materials, Chinese equipment. But the financial cost is to be borne by 3rd world countries. We have seen it in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Kenya.
I clearly mentioned Iran and Russia as chokepoints for land based transport. Europeans did not invent maritime transport for the fun of it. They discovered sea routes in response to the Ottomans cutting off land routes
Tell us any country that has benefited from this Chinese version of capitalism. Until then Sayanora
