The Economist June 11th 2022 41
ChinaForeignpolicyA new challenge to the West
I
t is nearly nine years since China’s
president, Xi Jinping, began to unveil his
first plan for global development. It was re
vealed in stages, in vague language that
conveyed little of what was eventually to
become a splurge of infrastructurebuild
ing across the world costing hundreds of
billions of dollars. Poor countries were de
lighted; the West grew unnerved. But the
Belt and Road Initiative (bri) has hit a few
potholes. Covid19 has taken a toll on debt
laden borrowers. Credit from China has
shrunk. So Mr Xi has hatched a new idea.
He calls it the Global Development Initia
tive (gdi), involving less concrete and
more greenery. The West will still be wary.
China’s promotion of the gdisuggests
how much more confident it has become
on the world stage since the bri’s lowkey
birth, less than a year into Mr Xi’s rule. Un
like the bri, which was pieced together
from speeches given by Mr Xi in Asian cap
itals late in 2013 and took months even to
acquire a simple name, the gdiwas de
clared with fanfare—labelled from the
start as an initiative with a capital “I”. It was
announced by Mr Xi in September in a vid
eo address to the unGeneral Assembly. Hebilled it as a response to the “severe
shocks” caused by the pandemic. State me
dia hailed the idea as China’s “golden pre
scription for global challenges”.
As the briwas at the beginning, the gdi
is, for now, not much more than a broad
brush vision. Officials say it will give new
impetus to unmembers’ uphill struggle to
achieve the Sustainable Development
Goals for 2030 that they agreed on seven
years ago. These cover a wide range of aspi
rations, including ending poverty and
hunger, ensuring everyone has access to
affordable clean energy, reducing inequal
ity and cutting pollution.
Covid has made fulfilling many of these
goals even harder. But China has not ex
plained exactly how it will help, nor sug
gested how much it is willing to spend. It
says it is open to others’ ideas for specificprojects. Mr Xi made only a couple of com
mitments in his speech at the un. He
promised his country would not build
more coalfired power plants abroad (it
had been fond of these) and pledged to give
an additional $3bn in aid to poor countries
to help them fight covid and recover from
the pandemic.
But Chinese officials clearly regard the
gdias a project of huge importance. State
media still gush about the bri, the pursuit
of which was written into the Communist
Party’s charter in 2017 as one of its pledges.
It is not being discarded. The gdi, though,
is gaining much attention, too. Official
newspapers call it an “expansion” of the
bri, and, like the bri, a manifestation of
“Chinese wisdom”.
Mr Xi has been pushing the idea hard.
He routinely raises the gdiin conversa
tions with foreign leaders, appealing for
their support. Chinese diplomats endless
ly tout its virtues. They eagerly proclaim
the latest tally of the number of countries
that back it: about 100 so far (compared
with about 150 that have signed up to the
bri). Half of them are members of a group
that China launched in January at the un
called the Friends of the Global Develop
ment Initiative. Last month China’s for
eign minister, Wang Yi, told them that his
country would soon roll out “a host of prac
tical measures” to enact the scheme. He
said China would arrange a “highlevel
meeting on global development at a proper
time”. This implies that China aims to
gather world leaders to discuss the gdi.
Western countries, however, are leeryChina’s Global Development Initiative is not as innocent as it sounds→Alsointhissection
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