The EconomistFebruary 8th 2020 Special reportChina’s Belt and Road 92 the American navy dominates, is the world’s busiest maritime
area, with nearly a third of world seaborne trade passing through it
a year—including 80% of China’s energy imports. China’s concern
is that at a time of crisis or war, America and its allies could choke
off the narrow strait, throttling China.
But the planned corridor in Myanmar runs through a violent
and highly complex land, home to over a dozen insurgent armies
in the borderlands financed by China-linked drugs, jade and log-
ging rackets. Chinese projects are as likely to throw fuel on the fire
of ethnic conflicts as bring peace and development. As for the
Myanmar government, China is too big to ignore. But it is also too
big to want to be dominated by, and many in the establishment,
from Aung San Suu Kyi down, have longstanding ties with the West
and Japan. For now, Myanmar is in the dog-
house with the West, for its army’s ethnic
cleansing of Muslim Rohingyas. Mr Xi cer-
tainly does not believe that will last.
Strategic dimensions along the mari-
time Silk Road are not limited to ports. Chi-
nese engineering companies have lobbied
Thailand’s army establishment about dig-
ging a 100km-long canal across the Kra
Isthmus in the country’s south. Supporters
say vessels heading for East Asia from the
Arabian Sea would shave 1,200km off their
passage. The Chinese navy could get quickly to the Indian Ocean. A
canal would put Thailand at the heart of a regional e-commerce
economy built around quick delivery times.
Though the generals want development, they are nervous
about the Kra canal. They fear Chinese dominance. And Thailand’s
south is complicated by a long-running Muslim insurgency—an
attack on a security checkpoint in November left 15 dead. The
army’s sacred mission has always been to hold the country togeth-
er. Physically slicing it in two and isolating the restive Muslim
south makes them queasy.
Not everything, then, is guaranteed to go China’s way. Certain-
ly, it is the Eurasian geopolitical force, a combination of economic
might and geographic extent. But along both the belt and the road,
Chinese-led efforts meet those of other powers. In continental
Eurasia, as the Silk Road reconfigures, other former empires make
their mark along it. Turkey has long-standing ethnic ties with
Turkic peoples in Central Asia, and construction and business ex-
pertise to offer. Iran, while facing American hostility and sanc-
tions, has made developing ties with Central Asia a “fundamental
policy”. As for the Indian Ocean, India remains the regional naval
power. In Colombo, alongside China Merchants, India and Japan
are jointly to develop a new container terminal.
China claims that “win-win co-operation” is what the briis all
about. Who would want it any other way? Yet along the fast-emerg-
ing digital Silk Road things look increasingly zero-sum. 7Not everything is
guaranteed to go
China’s wayWhat’s in a name?
Go forth and sloganiseS
uppose youwanted to imagine a new
world, or even a new world order.
How, then, would you go about conjuring
it up? You would do well to start with a
name.
Forget for a moment the significant
problems of translating President Xi
Jinping’s grand project for an English-
speaking audience. In Chinese it is called
yi dai yi lu: literally, “one belt, one road”.
Such correlative, four-character
phrases are common in Chinese, and
imply balance, harmony, wholeness. Yi
fu yi qi, or “one husband, one wife”, is
monogamy; yi xin yi yi, or “one heart, one
soul” means wholeheartedly. As Eyck
Freymann at Oxford University writes in
a forthcoming book, “One Belt One
Road”, to a Chinese audience the phrase
has a classical, even epic ring.
It evokes an image of China “going
forth to encompass the world on land
and sea, at once opening to the world and
binding the world more closely to China,
in a balanced and harmonious way.” To a
Chinese ear, that would carry echoes of
the ancient concept of tianxia(literally,
“all under heaven”), by which emperors
ruled. In an orderly, peaceful hierarchy,
your obligations depend on your rela-
tionships within the hierarchy. China’sstatus as hierarchical leader goes without
saying. There are, admittedly, obligations
there too. China keeps the whole cosmic
show on the road.
And in English? “One Belt One Road”, or
oborfor short, was the official name at
launch. But in 2015 the Communist Party’s
Central Compilation and TranslationBureau issued an English name change, to
the “Belt and Road Initiative”, or bri.
That sounded easier on an English
speaker’s ear. Not least, it allowed seman-
tically for the possibility of multiple belts
and roads (even if confusion remained
about what a belt was, and why a road
should go by sea).
But calling the dream an initiative is
suggestive. First, by abandoning the classi-
cal intimations implied in the Chinese
phrase, a sense of China’s return to histori-
cal greatness has been removed for the
benefit of foreign audiences. Second, a
power that wants to conceal from other
countries what, in terms of loftier ambi-
tions for global pre-eminence, it is signal-
ling to its own people, could do worse than
choose a bland, unthreatening word like
“initiative”.
Meanwhile, official Chinese sources
publishing in English have not all fallen
into line with the translation bureau’s
ruling. “obor” is still used, along with the
“Belt and Road” and, often, the “New Silk
Road”. Not only, says Mr Freymann, does
the party-state want to communicate two
very different interpretations of the bri
concept to domestic and foreign audi-
ences respectively. It has also been rather
sloppy in doing so.