| Next | Section menu | Main menu | Previous |

The road to health?

Dominic Ziegler: Banyan columnist, The Economist, HONG KONG

Vaccine diplomacy will give China a makeover

If you have not heard of China’s “health Silk Road”, you will soon

FOR MUCH of 2020 sceptics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) called it

overhyped and overextended. President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy is

a mix of economic engagement, diplomacy and canny branding. He intended it

to seize the historical moment, as American leadership stumbled, to shape a

world order more to China’s liking. The estimated cost of improving global

infrastructure, a skein of metaphorical Silk Roads encircling the world by land

and (even more) by sea, rose to $6trn.

The claims made for and against the BRI were exaggerated. China said it was showing
countries the way towards a new and transformational kind of development. Critics in
America said China was exporting its dystopian authoritarianism and deliberately
entrapping poor countries through debt. Yet the shine was coming off the BRI even
before the coronavirus pandemic caused global growth to slow sharply.