The Belt and Road Initiative: A domestically-motivated program fueling global competition

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s ambitious overseas economic and infrastructure program, is having a significant impact on the world economy. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has pledged $1 trillion in investment; the extensive geographic scope of the initiative involves more than 150 countries; there are a wide range of international organizations involved; and the initiative has brought China’s unpredictable political influence to the forefront of global affairs. Within China, the BRI is widely acknowledged as Beijing’s central diplomatic and economic policy.The project is strongly associated with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary and PRC President Xi Jinping, who announced the BRI in Kazakhstan and Indonesia in 2013. The Chinese database of Xi Jinping’s important speeches records President Xi as mentioning the BRI 1,653 times between February 7, 2014 and August 23, 2019—on average, once every 1.2 days (CCP News, 2020). Xi has also promoted the expansion of the BRI into areas beyond infrastructure—promoting, for example, construction of an international “Health Silk Road” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Xinhua, March 16). It could be argued that the future political success of President Xi is tied to the BRI—and that any fiasco of the initiative would ultimately damage Xi’s reputation.After several years of implementation, the BRI can be regarded as a constantly evolving and ambiguously-defined program, covering almost every aspect of economic and political life in China. As Jonathan Hillman has stated, the BRI “is so big it is almost impossible for one person to have mastery of it. Sometimes I wonder if China grasps the whole thing.” [1] What has led the political leadership of the PRC to invest so much in this program, in terms of both resources and reputation? Foreign observers often discuss the BRI in terms of the PRC’s geopolitical ambitions—but in actuality, its primary motivating factors are domestic in origin