China’s Bridge and Road Initiative, BRI, first announced in 2013, is reaching 10 years old. What have been achieved in a decade?
The achievements under three broad categories:
Infrastructures, Energy, Agriculture
Infrastructures
Besides bridges and roads, there are railways, ports, airports, dams, tunnels, communication systems, even aerospace set-ups.
Energy
Green energy such as solar and wind.
Agriculture
Agricultural technology to farm new crops and improve crop yield.
These have aided the development of many un- or under-developed or developing parts of the world from Europe to Mid-East to Africa, Asia and South America.the Chinese BRI. It did. In the G7 Summit Meeting in 2021, the US initiated the Build Back Better World (B3W) Initiative. In the G7 meeting in 2022, the B3W was renamed as Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). From the very
It has not been easy. The BRI faces demonisations by the US-led West and its allies from the very beginning of its inception.
“That’s the Chinese threat going global”,
“It’s Chinese Colonisation of the World”,
“The Chinese is taking over the world,”
the most demonic of which is to refer to projects under the Initiative as “debt-traps”.
These demonisations, coupled with opposition politics in democracies, caused some countries to discontinue their BRI projects. There are also those who challenged the US-led West to start its own initiative instead of feeling a pain in its arse about
Meanwhile, the Chinese eschew political ideology and concentrate on the pragmatics of real development. Their BRI continues to march ahead with increasing number of successfully completed projects around the world. Two recent accomplishments are theHigh Speed Rail in Laos and Indonesia. In comparison, the US own HSR , initiated decades ago, after going through several Presidencies, continues to experience delay and budget overrun, with no end in sight. So too India’s HSR under a Japanese-Indian
That's how things will continue to be – the Chinese build and build, the US-led West and allies talk and talk.
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