Read: Hong Kong shows the flaws in China’s zero-sum worldview

In fact, OBOR is something else entirely: a sweeping, poorly coordinated branding campaign posing as an infrastructure initiative. The campaign dovetails with Xi’s personality cult and expanding political authority inside China. Since so much of China’s economic and political engagement with the outside world now falls under the banner of OBOR, countries, firms, organizations, and individuals that embrace Xi’s favored brand can expect to be duly rewarded with investments, loans, promotions, or subtle forms of political favor. Likewise, those that show insufficient enthusiasm can be easily punished.

Understanding OBOR as a branding campaign helps to explain its bizarre excesses. OBOR’s most fawning devotees are not the developing countries that supposedly benefit from China’s largesse, but the smaller nonstate actors closer to China that depend on the Communist Party’s good favor: local officials and bureaucrats, universities, lower-tier cities, private businesses—including Western corporations from Boeing to Walmart, and from Samsung to Allianz—and nearly every large company and public institution in Hong Kong.

Chinese companies and local governments have used OBOR to brand everything from kitchenware to cosmetics, from opera to blood donations, from soccer to the social-credit system, from art shows to military hardware, and from beer to blockchain. In big international contracts, politically favored state-owned enterprises such as the shipping giant COSCO often get the choicest, highest-potential deals. Private firms and less favored state firms are left to show their loyalty by competing for scraps. These include most of OBOR’s well-publicized risky ventures and white-elephant projects, such as the aborted plan to build a transoceanic canal across Nicaragua.

To those acquainted with the rituals of ideological performance on which the Chinese party-state is built, Xi’s assertion of ownership over the OBOR brand is a naked power play. Every attentive Chinese official knows that the “New Silk Road” was a common buzzword in policy circles years before Xi took power. In public, however, the same people resolutely credit Xi alone for proposing it. Instead of punishing opportunists who flippantly co-opt Xi’s national brand for their own ventures, high-ranking Communist Party officials award them golden trophies for “outstanding OBOR brand contributions.” Like the servile ministers in Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” those who praise One Belt One Road as a novel strategy are actually performing loyalty to Xi and the Communist Party’s monopoly over truth.

Washington’s response to OBOR is to treat it as a dangerous geopolitical development—an investment initiative gone bad. The 2018 National Security Strategy accused China of practicing “predatory economics.” Beijing is trying to build a “treasury-run empire,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last October, and “we intend to oppose them at every turn.”