Belt and Road - by Bruno Maçães

ISBN: 9781787380028
Date read: 2025-06-26
How strongly I recommend it: 3/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Exploring implications of a vague Chinese plan to interconnect infrastructure with most countries. Written 2016-2018, making future predictions about times now passed. I got a few insights.

my notes

Fortune is hard to recognize as it comes, and hard to grab once passed.

So what is the Belt and Road?
It is a name and little more than a name.
Concepts such as “the West” come the closest.
Belt and Road is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart.

Belt and Road: nine arrows crisscrossing Eurasia in all directions: six economic corridors on land and three sea routes whose final goal is to create a new global economy and place China at its center.
An interconnected system of transport, energy and digital infrastructure would gradually develop into industrial clusters and free trade zones and then an economic corridor spanning construction, logistics, energy, manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, culminating in the birth of a large Eurasian common market.
Belt and Road is mainly about economic cooperation, including building factories, roads, bridges, ports, airports and other infrastructure as well as electric power grids, telecommunications networks, oil and natural gas pipelines and related projects.
It’s designed to stimulate and better integrate China’s domestic economy as well as enhance Beijing’s influence abroad.

Belt and Road is meant to encompass the whole world and the totality of human life.
Xi called it a “community of shared destiny.”
The traditional concept of Tianxia (天下):
Relations between units or actors determine the obligations corresponding to their network ties.
Relations are based on mutual benefit.
Once established they should take precedence over individual choices.

Belt and Road is certainly not one project.
It is an idea, a concept, a process, better captured through a metaphor, not an exact description.
It includes Latin America, the Caribbean and Australia.
It could perhaps more appropriately be named — were it not to convey an expansionist slogan — Land and Sea.

The traditional opaqueness of Chinese politics and of the Chinese state was once a useful shield, a means of staying out of the limelight.
Now it is a way to magnify Beijing’s reach: that we know so little about what China is doing seems to show that it is present everywhere.

By increasing investments abroad, China hopes to find more profitable outlets for its foreign exchange reserves — most of which are in low-interest-bearing American government securities — while creating new markets for Chinese companies.

It addresses China’s dependence on a global system it could not shape or control.

October 2013: Xi Jinping said China should be more proactive in promoting diplomacy with its neighbors.
It was the moment when “striving for achievement” replaced “keeping a low profile”.
Instead of China opens up to the outside world, the world opens itself to China.

Urumqi in Xinjiang is closer to the borders of Europe than to Beijing or Shanghai.

China needs to import 600 million tons of crude oil and 300 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually.
Belt and Road can develop trade and energy routes along historically disadvantaged regions, thereby reducing China’s vulnerability to an American naval blockade of the Malacca strait in case of conflict.
In 2016, 80% of China’s imported oil passed through the Indian Ocean and Malacca Strait into the South China Sea.
If a maritime crisis or a war were to happen, these routes could be cut off.

China has started to see interdependence as an opportunity.
Less afraid of political and cultural globalization because they can be shaped according to a Chinese model.
Western alliances are described by Chinese as “tiny circle of friends” leaving everyone else excluded.

The world does not move from harmony to conflict but from conflict to harmony — from the West to the Belt and Road.

China closed a key border-crossing with Mongolia a week after the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, visited the country.
Hundreds of truck drivers for the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto were stuck at the Gants Mod crossing in south-eastern Mongolia in freezing temperatures.

When the idea of a “harmonious world” is presented as the inevitable endpoint of historical development, it becomes uncompromising and oppressive.

Wang Huning, the philosopher-king behind Xi, arguably the intellectual creator of the Belt and Road.

Most of the countries along the routes of the Belt and Road did not have the money to pay for the projects with which they were involved.
Beijing regards financing mechanisms as a critical part of the initiative, the motor of the engine.

Horgos International Cooperation Center is a free trade and free movement zone built across the border between China and Kazakhstan.
Goods sold inside the Cooperation Center may be carried across the border free of tariffs.
People too may circulate inside the area without having to transit a border post.
The border between the two countries has in fact been rendered just as invisible as, say, that between Belgium and the Netherlands.
China sees Kazakhstan as its gateway to Europe and has encouraged the speedy development of some of the most emblematic local projects.
In May 2018 China and the Eurasian Economic Union signed a free-trade agreement in Astana.

Russia’s decision to endorse the Belt and Road changed the parameters of the project.
It gave the green light to China’s ambitions for countries such as Kazakhstan and Georgia.

Pakistan is the gateway to the Indian Ocean, because the strategic alliance between the two countries goes back decades.
A central priority is the construction and development of Gwadar city and port.
Gwadar lies in a privileged strategic position, with a claim to becoming a new Chinese coastal city.

Bypassing the Malacca strait by building a canal through the Kra Isthmus in Thailand — around 100 km long and 25 meters deep, it would take ten years to build — could be an even greater game changer.

Ethiopia, a country of 100 million inhabitants where China wants to move some of its low-end manufacturing, such as footwear and apparel.
For that purpose, it has financed and built a new fast railway linking Addis Ababa and Djibouti.

There is no way to enter the global market without adopting the standards everyone else is using, unless one develops new standards and manages to get them widely accepted.
The return on investment for a port in Sri Lanka or a rail line in Thailand matters less to Chinese officials than the ability to push participating countries to adopt Chinese standards on everything from construction to finance to data management.

From the outset, the fear that time would wear off the consensus around the initiative encouraged Xi Jinping and his circle of advisors to run greater risks and make the Belt and Road so critical to the Chinese leadership and the Chinese Communist Party that it can no longer be abandoned.
Enshrined in the Party Constitution, it stands above criticism.
Setbacks will be downplayed and every success magnified.

Xi: “We are now facing a historic opportunity that happens only once in a thousand years. If we handle it well, we will prosper. But if we screw it up, there will be problems, big problems.”
This is the scope of China’s current ambition.
The Belt and Road will succeed to the extent that it helps propel China’s rise to its last stage, its denouement or, so to speak, the announced terminus of its prophetic history.

If Japan had grown into the second largest economy in the world without disturbing the status quo — while reinforcing it as a matter of fact — the same could perhaps be expected of China.

China is putting forth a clear challenge to the existing liberal order.
A different system carrying different values, virtues, and principles.
China now offers an alternative model with an increasingly global appeal.
It would replace a model whose failures have become all too obvious.

Will China succeed in reshaping global order or will the order fracture into two opposing and irreconcilable visions?

To move closer to Western values or to attempt to imitate the West in different areas would be tantamount to abdicating China’s edge, opting to compete on territory defined by the West and therefore on terms clearly tilted in its favor.
China has no need for Western culture, ideas and values.

Standing up +
getting rich +
becoming powerful.
Ways to divide the histories of the Party and the Republic, referring respectively to:
Mao Zedong era (standing up)
Deng Xiaoping era (getting rich)
Xi Jinping era. (becoming powerful)

Just as every individual has a right to privacy, CCP also has a right to privacy.