Xi Jinping himself changed his 'dream project'. In 2021 he recast the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as “small and beautiful” saying the emphasis should shift to smaller, less costly projects in areas such as clean energy and technology.
His original plan was different. Designed to "dwarf" even the Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe after World War II, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first unveiled by President Xi Jinping in a 2013 speech at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.
He later pledged to invest US$1 trillion, and by some estimates as much as $8 trillion, in roads, railways, bridges, ports and other infrastructure projects around the world.
In contrast, the Eastern Corridor of the International North-South Transit Corridor (INSTC) achieved a significant milestone on 8 November 2025, when a cargo train originating north of Moscow arrived in Iran, carrying 62 40-foot containers through Central Asia.
The 900-km journey to the Aprin dry port in Tehran took 12 days, crossing Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan before entering Iran at Incheh Borun.
Since March 2025, New Delhi has been using the same route to send cargo from the Mundra Port in Gujarat to Central Asia via Iran’s Bandar Abbas port.
For India, the INSTC’s Eastern Corridor not only provides an alternative to the Suez Canal but is also vital to fulfilling India’s goal of achieving US$2 trillion in exports by 2030.
***
As for BRI, Xi wanted to herald a world changing project with an emphasis on sparking economic development in the underfinanced Global South.
"Thirteen years after its launch, many observers and analysts now see the BRI as more of a liability than an asset to China’s plan to forge a post-America-led world order," writes well traveled journalist and author Bertil Lintner.
"Connectivity has become one of the dominant defining themes of contemporary global politics. States, irrespective of their size or geographic location, seek to enhance connectivity to advance their strategic interests. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) epitomises this trend. Located at the intersection of South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, and West Asia, Afghanistan has consistently been mapped into the BRI. However, its representation remains a paradoxical puzzle," says an article in website of 'Observer Research Foundation'.
China has rhetorically positioned Afghanistan as a connectivity hub; it has, in practice, excluded the country from its actual connectivity projects.
Afghanistan's place in the BRI — symbolically included yet strategically excluded — reflects both security considerations and redundancy as a connectivity node, given China's access to alternative corridors through Pakistan and Central Asia.
The BRI projects have become more transactional, aimed at securing energy and minerals, acquiring equity stakes in developing-world natural resources and finding overseas buyers for China’s surplus industrial output amid rising Western protectionism, rather than advancing Xi’s once-grand vision of a more equitable alternative to supposed Western exploitation of the Global South.
For many developing nations, BRI-related loans have become a new type of financial albatross, pushing them deep into debt to China with scant prospects of repaying at the initial interest rates and terms.
It has also caused financial strain among Chinese financial institutions directed by Beijing to issue BRI-related loans and credit facilities, which have struggled to collect on those debts.
China’s two main policy banks, China Development Bank and China Eximbank, carry particularly high exposure to non-performing loans in low- and middle-income countries, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary University, writes Bertil in 'Asian Times'.
Beijing’s attempts to swap unpaid loans for equity have met with only moderate success and sparked nationalistic firestorms in some BRI-recipient nations.
In December 2017, unable to service the heavy commercial loans used to build the underperforming deep-sea port at Hambantota on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, the Colombo government signed a 99-year lease giving China Merchants Port Holdings a 70% controlling stake.
Laos, already one of Asia’s poorest countries, accumulated enormous external debt under the BRI to pay for large-scale infrastructure projects.
There is an interesting twist.
New Delhi's opposition to another Chinese 'ambitious project' the CPEC China-Pakistan Economic Corridor — is rooted in concerns that it violates "India's territorial integrity and sovereignty".
This complicates the regional connectivity landscape.
While China promotes BRI and CPEC as a platform for regional connectivity, India views them with scepticism, perceiving BRI as a strategic initiative aimed at augmenting China's influence and asserting dominance over South Asia.
 |
| INSTC |
India has also advanced alternative connectivity frameworks, including the Chabahar Port project and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). This essentially offers a competing vision of regional integration.
The International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) is a 7,200-kilometer (4,500-mile) multi-modal transport network using ships, railways, and roads to move freight between India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Central Asia, and Europe.
The INSTC Connects ::::
Mumbai (India) via sea to Bandar Abbas/Chabahar (Iran), overland across Iran to the Caspian Sea (Bandar-e-Anzali), across the Caspian Sea to Astrakhan (Russia), and onward via rail to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Northern Europe.
Signed on September 12, 2000, in St. Petersburg by India, Iran, and Russia.
---- Expended to 13 countries including India, Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, and Oman, with Syria and Bulgaria as observers.
Yuen Yuen Ang, a prominent political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in a 2018 essay that the BRI’s modus operandi was “typical of China, where the central government often issues broad directives and expects lower-ranking officials to figure out how to fulfill them.”
The hallmark of such communist-style mass campaigns is frenzied enthusiasm and little coordination. Vast resources and human capital are mobilized toward one goal.
ends
No comments:
Post a Comment