|
「一帶一路」計畫如何贏得世界 - Shannon Tiezzi
|
瀏覽1,257 ｜回應2｜推薦1 |
|
|
|
前一陣子盛傳義大利有意退出「一帶一路」計畫，引發一陣它的唱衰潮。泰西女士是《外交家》網誌的主編，她這篇文章自然有一定的份量(見下文)。我還是依存檔備查的慣例，不做譯述或評論。
How China’s Belt and Road Took Over the World
Mapping the BRI’s growth over its first 10 years – and its transformation from a Eurasian transit corridor to an initiative with global scope.
Shannon Tiezzi, 09/12/23
On September 7, 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Titled “Work Together to Build the Silk Road Economic Belt,” the address evoked the history of the ancient Silk Road, which Xi traced back to a Chinese envoy in the 2nd century BC.
The speech, as befitted its setting, was narrowly focused on China and Central Asia, with repeated references to historical ties. Xi’s original proposal was that China and its Eurasian neighbors “jointly build an economic belt along the Silk Road.” The original proposal, besides being geographically restricted, was also relatively narrow in its sectoral scope. Xi mentioned four areas for cooperation under the Silk Road Economic Belt: policy consultation, road connections, trade facilitation, and monetary circulation (trade in local currencies).
One month later, the Silk Road Economic Belt was joined by the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” which Xi proposed during a similar speech before the Indonesian legislature. The Maritime Silk Road was also circumscribed in both geographic and thematic scope: Xi’s original pitch was limited to “maritime cooperation” with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Those were the humble roots of what became known jointly as “One Belt, One Road,” later rebranded into the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English (in Chinese, the One Belt, One Road / 一带一路 nomenclature stuck). Over time, the BRI grew far beyond the original vision to expand into almost every region of the world. As of the 10th anniversary of Xi’s speech in Kazakhstan, 154 countries had signed official documents on BRI cooperation with China, according to the official “Belt and Road Portal” website run by the Chinese government.
The sectors covered by the BRI had multiplied as well. When Xi described the still-evolving vision at the first Belt and Road Forum in May 2017, he still mentioned the original four pillars of policy connectivity, infrastructure connectivity (now expanded far beyond the original reference to “roads” to include railways, ports, pipelines, and digital infrastructure), trade facilitation, and financial connectivity (now including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Silk Road Fund, and other lending mechanisms in addition to the use of local currencies). Added to the mix was a new emphasis on “people-to-people connectivity” in the form of cultural and educational exchanges.
The BRI has spawned even more subsets since then: the Digital Silk Road, the Polar Silk Road, the Health Silk Road, the Space Silk Road, and the Green Silk Road. Far from its targeted origins, today nearly any cooperation project China undertakes in any country around the world could conceivably be categorized as part of the Belt and Road.
Given the initiative’s enormous growth since September 2013, it’s worth looking at how the Belt and Road spread around the world.
Where the BRI Stands Today
As of September 2023, there are 154 members of the BRI – 80 percent of the United Nations’ 193 member states. At this point, then, it’s easier to discuss who’s not in the BRI.
The holdouts stand out easily in the map above: all of North America, most of Western Europe, and a good part of South America.
Elsewhere in the world, the United States’ fellow Quad members – Australia, Japan, and India – have not joined up; all have their own deep concerns about China’s global ambitions. In the Middle East, close U.S. allies Jordan and Israel are the lone hold-outs. And then there are the 15 countries that don’t have diplomatic ties with China: Taiwan’s 13 remaining diplomatic allies, as well as Bhutan and Kosovo.
Perhaps the most curious omission is North Korea – ostensibly a close Chinese partner that is badly in need of the additional funding that would come from BRI membership. It’s possible that China simply saw extending Pyongyang an invite to join as a bad risk: little to gain and a lot to lose, given North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and heavily sanctioned status. (BRI member Iran is also a nuclear proliferation risk under heavy sanctions, but unlike North Korea it occupies a pivotal geographic location linking Central Asia and the Middle East.)
The regional breakdown shines some light on the regions where the BRI has found the most buy-in. Both Central Asia and Southeast Asia count every regional state as members; North America is the only region of the world where no state has joined. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions also stand out, with over 90 percent of regional countries having signed BRI agreements with China.
Given that so much of the BRI’s image is tied to lucrative infrastructure funding offers for member states, it’s unsurprising that there is a strong correlation between national wealth and BRI membership. High income countries are the least likely to join, with less than half (46 percent) having signed up. Upper middle income countries have a much higher rate of BRI membership, 79 percent. From there, the rate jumps astronomically, with over 90 percent of both lower middle and low income countries having joined.
In fact, there are just five lower middle and low income countries that have not signed up, and the reasons for each are obvious: Bhutan, Eswatini, and Haiti don’t have diplomatic relations with China; India has a deep distrust of Beijing (and resents that the BRI passes through Pakistan-administered Kashmir); and North Korea, as discussed above, may be too much of a pariah even for China.
How the BRI Got to Now
Just as interesting as where the Belt and Road stands after its first decade is the story of how it got there. The map below shows BRI member counts as of December 31 for each calendar year (aside from 2023, where data ends on September 11).
Things started out fairly slowly, with just five countries having signed BRI cooperation documents by the end of 2014. All of them are countries on what we can consider the original concept of the Belt and Road – transit points either by land or by sea linking China to Europe.
Things started to heat up in 2015, with 16 countries joining the Belt and Road. Again, the geographic scope is within the bounds of a China-Europe connection. Interestingly, eight European countries joined this year, most of them ahead of the China-Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) summit that was held in Suzhou in November of that year. This was the heyday of what was then known as the “16+1” format, with various countries in Central and Eastern Europe vying to be China’s “bridge to Europe.”
This also marked a major trend in BRI expansion: Many of these agreements would be signed in the immediate lead-up to a large regional summit. That, in turn, raises questions about just how much individual thought China was putting into each agreement, as opposed to rushing to grab as many signatories as possible to showcase at a major diplomatic event.
Without a big headlining summit, 2016 saw a return to modest expansion, with just five countries signing new agreements. By contrast, 31 countries would join in 2017 – a surge driven largely by the first Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing that May. By the end of the year, nearly all of Central and Southeast Asia had signed on, with the exceptions of Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Central and Eastern Europe has also become a solid Belt and Road bloc, with more members from that region than from Africa as of the end of 2017.
It’s also important to note that, as of 2017, the BRI still largely followed the basic geographic focus first laid out in Xi’s addresses in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. Of the 58 states that had signed up to the Belt and Road by end of 2017, Panama and New Zealand are the only states not conceivably on a map of overland or maritime transit routes between China and Europe.
2018, however, would the year the BRI truly went global.
A whopping 67 countries signed BRI agreements that year, driven by two major summits: the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in Beijing and a summit of Pacific Island leaders on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Papua New Guinea. Those two events alone saw 38 countries join the BRI fold: 31 African states just before or after FOCAC 2018, and seven Pacific Island countries ahead of the summit in Papua New Guinea.
By this point, the BRI had lost all semblance of the original Eurasian connection, instead becoming a catch-all for China’s foreign policy in general. BRI members can be found throughout the Pacific Islands region, Central and South America, and across all of the African continent.
2019 was another good year for growth, thanks to China’s hosting of the second Belt and Road forum in May of that year. Fifteen states joined up, 10 of them in the lead-up to the big event.
But things came skidding to a halt in 2020, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed China’s borders for nearly three years. The only addition to the Belt and Road in 2020 was Kiribati, which sneaked in just before the world shut down.
Kiribati’s President Taneti Maamau visited China on January 6, 2020 – the first such visit after Kiribati established ties with China in September 2019. This typifies another pattern of BRI growth: Since its announcement in 2013, countries that have cut ties with Taiwan tend to sign up to the Belt and Road as part of their diplomatic embrace of Beijing. Panama in 2017, the Dominican Republic in 2018, Solomon Islands in 2019, Kiribati in 2020, Nicaragua in 2022, and Honduras in 2023 all followed this trend.
Ahead of the FOCAC summit in 2021, China inked deals with most of the African countries that had been holding out; all seven of the countries to join that year are part of sub-Saharan Africa. Another five countries from around the world joined in 2022, and just one has signed up thus far in 2023.
The slow-down in growth is not surprising, given the simple fact that there are fewer countries that haven’t joined – and they mostly have good reasons for refusing and will be difficult to persuade.
Does the BRI’s Spread Matter?
The trillion dollar question remains: How much does it really matter when a country signs a BRI cooperation document? In one sense, of course it matters – such agreements are a handy barometer of countries that have a positive relationship with Beijing (or, at least, did at one point). In addition to foreign governments hoping for increased investment and trade flows from China, the symbolism of growing the BRI to the maximum extent clearly matters for Beijing. That’s added motivation for the signatories: If Beijing is pushing a partner government to sign on, they are likely to do so absent a pressing national interest pulling in the opposite direction (for example, India’s concerns about the BRI passing through disputed areas).
But BRI agreements are non-binding and of little value if not accompanied by actual project contracts. As discovered by Italy, which is reconsidering its membership in the BRI club, a cooperation document doesn’t always mean much in practice. Similarly, the CEE countries, some of the earliest members of the Belt and Road Initiative, have largely become disillusioned with China in general and the BRI in particular.
Indeed, data from the China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT), published by the American Enterprise Institute, shows that the United States, Australia, Brazil, France, and Germany all were among the top investment destinations for China from 2013 to now – despite none having joined the BRI.
This is not to say the BRI is meaningless – far from it. The CGIT also tracked $564 billion in Chinese funding for construction and BRI-related projects from 2013 to 2023. AidData found that China outspends the United States by a 2-to-1 ratio on international development finance – a shift in the balance of global aid that largely occurred following the BRI’s launch in 2013. As Ana Horigoshi of AidData noted in her recent article for The Diplomat Magazine:
In the first five years of the BRI (2013-2017), China bankrolled an average of $83.5 billion a year in overseas development projects, a net increase of $31.3 billion per year on average over the five years prior (2008-2012). The net increase alone is equivalent to the total U.S. average yearly financing in the 2013-2017 period.
But not all BRI member countries are created equal, especially given that much of the raw funding is tied up in “mega projects” worth $500 million or more. AidData further found that “despite larger loans and expanded loan portfolios, BRI has not led to any major changes in the sectoral or geographical composition of China’s overseas development finance program.”
In other words, signing up to the BRI does not guarantee a major influx of Chinese investment or developing finance, nor does sitting outside the Belt and Road preclude benefiting from China’s outward cash flows. Chinese money is largely flowing to the same places and sectors as before the BRI – just in larger quantities.
In that sense, the growth of the BRI is perhaps best understood as symbolic: a picture of countries whose aspirations for their relationships with China outweigh their concerns. With that in mind, the BRI’s reach today is important, if only as a good reminder that the vast majority of the world is not interested in “decoupling” from China.
Shannon Tiezzi is Editor-in-Chief at The Diplomat.
本文於 修改第 4 次
|
|
【探索中國】EP5 國際反中勢力對一帶一路的批評是否可信？ -- 蘇偉碩 vs 湯紹成
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
平行政府 論壇
「一帶一路」真的如許多台媒，外媒說的充滿「債務陷阱」嗎？湯紹成院長針對外媒、台媒習慣性詆譭「一帶一路」的實質成果，除了提出具體的反駁，且還指出美、歐從2021年起開始推動「重建更好的世界」倡議，意在與中國的「一帶一路」互別苗頭。
此舉無異於間接地証實「一帶一路」確實為全球經濟合作開闢了新的道路，也迫使美、歐等國不得不正面以對。湯院長表示，歷經三年疫情後，中國大陸的經濟已從谷底反彈，無論國內經濟或「一帶一路」的前景都是短空長多......
YT：https://youtu.be/h6HIcz5Yoto
本文於 修改第 1 次
|
|
「一帶一路」10周年評估 --- Zachary Fillingham
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
下文對「一帶一路」有深入的報導和分析。任何討論中國「經濟」現況或前景的論文，如果不包括此文所及內容，都不夠周全；也就有無知或偏頗之嫌。
Belt and Road at 10: A Paradigm Shift in Development Finance?
Zachary Fillingham, BACKGROUNDERS, 09/21/23
請至原網頁參看統計圖表
Ever since its largely unremarkable inception in a speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in 2013, President Xi’s landmark Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has represented a moving target for analysts and policymakers. The branding has evolved – from a Maritime Silk Road of the 21st century, to One Belt One Road, before finally settling on the current form. So too has the project’s geographic scope, which branched out from its original Eurasian focus to eventually encompass Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and even the Arctic. And in a shift beyond the original economic thrust of promoting infrastructure development, Belt and Road has evolved into a banner under which numerous educational, environmental, and technological exchanges proliferate around the world. Just two of many examples include the ‘Digital Silk Road,’ which seeks to expand the footprint of China’s tech giants and afford them a larger role in shaping global standards, and the ‘Space Silk Road’ which facilitates satellite launches and technical cooperation among developing countries.
It’s not only the Belt and Road Initiative that has been changing over the past decade. Shifts in the global distribution of economic and diplomatic power have also unfolded, leading to a gradual eclipse of US preeminence that has favored the expansion of the BRI, a platform that is generally presented as an alternative to traditional Western circuits of development finance. A similarly upward trajectory can be discerned in two other young institutions synonymous with China’s expanding global clout – the BRICS grouping and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) – both of which have expanded their membership and diplomatic influence in recent years.
From the vantage point of 2023, the historical weight of Belt and Road is undeniable. Even those ascribing a more nefarious or ideological dimension to China’s motivations are inclined to admit that BRI has become emblematic of not just the Xi Jinping era of Chinese politics, but also a wider paradigm shift in how Beijing views its place in international society. But does the high visibility and global reach of Belt and Road mean that the project has achieved its original objectives? This question will be explored in greater depth in the sections below.
“Mobilize resources, leverage growth drivers, and connect markets”
Mobilizing Resources: China as a Developmental Finance Superpower
Belt and Road can be viewed as ‘globalization with Chinese characteristics’ and, like conventional globalization, it is a fundamentally economic phenomenon that over time inevitably creeps into the political and military spheres, ultimately generating ever-deeper integration and dependencies. The central pillar of BRI remains trade facilitation via the creation of hard infrastructure (ports, roads, rails) and reduction of cross-border trade barriers (customs, inspections, quarantine). And the overriding goal is to connect global markets to the economic hub of China, thus securing an unimpeded stream of primary inputs and a permanent consumer base for Chinese exports.
The endeavor has above all entailed massive outlays of infrastructure finance to the developing world. It’s generally believed that over $1 trillion has been spent so far, with estimates varying due in part to frequent confusion over whether a given project bears the official BRI branding. These expenditures have propelled China to the commanding heights of global development finance: the country now spends around $85 billion per year on foreign infrastructure development, outspending the United States and other major powers on a 2-to-1 basis or more.
China’s spending also differs qualitatively from other global lenders. For one, it overwhelmingly favors loans over grants. In the BRI era, China has adopted a 31:1 ratio of loans to grants, and a 9:1 ratio of Other Official Flows (OOF) to Official Development Assistance (ODA). State-owned lenders have also extended loans with higher interest rates and shorter grace periods and maturation horizons than multilateral creditors on average. In an examination of 100 leaked BRI contracts – just a small sample of the tens of thousands of agreements that remain shielded from public scrutiny – Anna Gelpern et. al identify several distinctive characteristics of this surge in Chinese lending:
1) development loans are largely opaque and subject to extraordinarily strict confidentiality clauses;
2) loans tend to restrict the possibility of multilateral collective bargaining mechanisms such as the Paris Club process; and
3) loans often include various cancellation, linkage (to other China-linked loans), and repayment restrictions that together amount to extraordinary leverage on the part of the creditor, amplifying Beijing’s economic and political influence over borrowing parties.
The limited public data on how these loans are collateralized points in different directions. Research from AidData found that 40 of the 50 largest loans from China state-linked creditors offered collateral in the event of default, and that 83% of loans to countries that fell in the bottom quartile of global fiduciary risk were collateralized. This would seem to suggest that collateralization is Beijing’s preferred risk-mitigation strategy. However, leaked contracts elsewhere hint at less severe risk mitigation measures. Upon examination of a leaked BRI contract for road construction in Kyrgyzstan, Michael Schroeder found no such collateralization clauses, though noted the possibility of political influence being exercised through the various atypical clauses outlined above. All in all, while collateralization appears to be a recurrent theme in high-risk projects, its overall prevalence cannot be determined so long as the vast majority of BRI agreements remain secret.
In closing it’s worth noting that BRI-related infrastructure finance has helped fill a market gap in the chronic shortage of infrastructure finance across the developing world, with annual investment requirements estimated at anywhere between $2.9-$6.3 trillion. Even taking the high outlays of BRI-related finance into account, infrastructure investment is still expected to fall short by around $360 billion annually through 2040. In many cases, Chinese finance is the only option available for governments seeking to build critical infrastructure, and this lack of competition helps explain the favorable terms that Chinese lenders have often managed to secure in BRI contracts.
Leveraging Growth Drivers: BRI as an Economic Engine
Another clause in the abovementioned Kyrgyzstan contract is noteworthy: “the goods, technologies and services purchased by using the proceeds of Facility shall be purchased from China preferentially, and the technical standards to be used shall follow relevant Chinese and international standards.” Here the borrowing party is legally obliged to purchase labor and inputs sourced from China, and to abide by Chinese standards to the ultimate detriment of any potential competitors in the global arena. Thus, it’s not only favorable financial terms where China’s core interests are advanced. It’s also the domestic economic tailwinds produced from Chinese labor, inputs, and expertise being exclusively used to build some of the largest infrastructure projects in the world.
In this sense, Belt and Road is an externalization of the supply-side economics that drove China’s breakneck economic development since the 1980s. State-directed infrastructure investment has played an outsize role in China’s modern development story, so much so that infrastructure stimulus remains a policy failsafe to be reverted to in times of economic trouble. Yet Beijing’s domestic infrastructure spending has proven so prolific that it is now producing diminishing returns. Anecdotes of ‘roads to nowhere’ and ‘ghost cities’ proliferate as all levels of government try to generate economic activity through state-led construction, leaving ballooning debt loads in their wake. Enter the Belt and Road Initiative, which represents a proverbial escape hatch from infrastructure oversaturation without having to forego the perks of China’s established economic model. Moreover, BRI allows the debt risks inherent to domestic infrastructure development to be circumvented by offloading them onto borrowing countries; though, as later sections will illustrate, these risks cannot be mitigated entirely.
The economic benefits of BRI are reflected in the annual statements of China’s largest state-owned construction companies. China Railway Group (CREC), a major player that helped build notable BRI links such as the China-Laos and Addis Adaba-Djibouti railways, saw its revenue nearly double from 558 billion yuan in 2013 to 1,073 billion in 2021. China Railway Construction Corp (CRCC), a rail giant with over 340,000 employees, saw its Fortune 500 ranking of global companies jump from 100 to 39 over the same span. Taken together, from 2014-21, Chinese iron and steel makers invested some $17.5 billion in BRI countries, up from $4.7 billion over the previous eight years. These surging investment flows, facilitated in large part by the state under the BRI banner, have helped Chinese SOEs become five of the largest construction firms in the world.
Connecting Markets: China as Global Trade Hub
There is a more farsighted aspect to BRI that goes beyond debt leverage and domestic overproduction: the project endeavors to situate China at the center of a new global economy that will characterize trade flows for decades if not centuries. As such, the BRI infrastructure projects that tend to receive the most ardent support from state-linked entities are those that form new spokes connecting back to the hub of the Chinese economy. One example is Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, which represents a maritime link to Xinjiang that can circumvent the choke point of the Strait of Malacca; another is the vast network of roads and railways that with every passing year draws the economies of Southeast Asia ever closer to China. This objective of creating new hard infrastructure links echoes the large body of literature illustrating how such connections can boost overall trade volumes and facilitate industrialization, particularly when a region suffers from a severe infrastructure deficit (which is widely true of BRI members). ‘Soft’ barriers, such as incompatible or inefficient legal and regulatory frameworks, can also act as impediments to cross-border trade flows, and high-level official speeches often ascribe as much weight to the importance of establishing ‘soft connectivity’ through the harmonization of cross-border frameworks as to the building of hard infrastructure itself.
Europe was always a natural target for greater connectivity given its importance as an export market, and early efforts to establish a direct rail corridor under BRI are now reaching fruition. The link is composed of two routes at various stages of completion.
The first of these is the Northern Corridor, which is essentially Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway extended to link up with Beijing and Dalian. Second is the Central or Middle Corridor which runs from Lanzhou in central China and through the Kazakh ‘dry port’ of Khorgos, where cargoes must be offloaded to account for different rail gauges, before branching northward to the Russian route or southward to join up with the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) joining Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey via the Caspian Sea. This southward branch has seen its appeal boosted since the outbreak of the Ukraine war as European shippers seek to avoid traversing Russian territory for fear of sanctions. The portion could be expanded further to incorporate Iran in the future, improving transit times by bypassing the Caspian Sea crossing and potentially even linking up with the India-championed International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).
The creation of the Eurasian Land Bridge cast China’s BRI in a primarily facilitating role: offering finance and diplomatic impetus for modernizing, harmonizing, and joining up pre-existing national rail networks. These efforts are now paying off, evident in the total 40,000 China-Europe freight trips on a route that prior to 2011 did not functionally exist. In 2021 alone, the China Railway Express (CR Express) – the callsign under which over 50 Chinese cities are connected to 24 European countries via 82 routes – operated over 15,183 trains carrying 1.46 million TEUs of cargo.
A similar process is unfolding in Southeast Asia, although the region’s pronounced infrastructure gap has forced BRI to play a more active role in financing and building new transport lines. Examples include Laos’ transborder railway connecting Vientiane with Kunming; the extension of said railway onward to Bangkok (expected to be completed in 2028); Cambodia’s toll expressway linking Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville (incidentally the site of a rumored future PLA Navy base); and Malaysia’s East Coast Rail Link (ECRL). In addition, plans exist to bridge the Thailand rail system with that of Cambodia and (even more ambitiously) Malaysia, along with a planned modernization of Vietnam’s Lao Cai-Hanoi rail link connecting the capital to China’s border. The overall vision for Southeast Asia mirrors that of the Eurasian Land Bridge: an interconnected regional transit system moving goods and people, with China forever at its core.
Conclusion
In light of the above, it would appear difficult to argue that BRI has not been a major success: the initiative has increased China’s diplomatic influence, stimulated growth internally and externally, and helped to ensure China’s ongoing centrality in regional trade networks for decades if not centuries. Yet a final determination cannot be made without embarking on a closer look of the risks that Beijing has taken on in pursuit of these goals. That will be the topic of the next article in this series.
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
|
本城市首頁
看回應文章
等級：8
