Harold James says China has its “alternative” vision of globalisation, and President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy venture, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is more material than immaterial, harking backing to the old days, when rich countries helped build bridges and roads in poor countries, rather than promoting free market ideas. Following the debt crisis in developing countries in the 1980s, the West came to their rescue, with strings attached. It dictated the economic development and oversaw institution building there, in accordance with the Washington Consensus.

The author says the BRI prides itself on an integrated system of physical infrastructure, that aims to reconstruct the ancient Silk Road trade routes while also building new ones. Unlike the Western-led “immaterial world of financialization,” in which the IMF, the World Bank, the EU and the US had played a global role, China’s BRI represents a change in its philosophy of economic development and expansion strategy overseas. The BRI is seen as an extension of the Communist Party’s efforts to undermine the security and economic architecture of the international order. China’s growing largesse comes largely at the expense of international institutions and Western influence.

While BRI provides new opportunities for China in terms of regional cooperation and global development, many also raise concerns about China’s intentions of using economic means to achieve strategic and foreign policy objectives. Initially Xi seeks to boost growth in the under-developed region bordering several Central Asian republics in Western China, in order to address the income inequality between the coastal elite and the impoverished rural population, which could pose a threat to social stability.

The author points out that China’s BRI to “link un-globalized regions through infrastructure is not unprecedented. Over a century ago, Britain was the world’s leading power, but Germany was catching up in terms of wealth and technological development.” Xi’s ambition could be likened to a German emperor’s. Kaiser Wilhelm II (German emperor from 1888-1918) wanted to “project power both on and and at sea.” But to compete with Britain, he could not rely on German merchant navy alone, so he launched his “own equivalent” of the BRI: a railroad stretching from Berlin to Baghdad.

The Berlin-Baghdad railway was dubbed a "half-mad imperial enterprise” – a total waste of resources. Like the BRI, the “new German rail links connected remote areas over land and appealed to the losers of that period of globalization. Chief among these was the Ottoman Empire,” which was called the “sick man of Europe.” The Turks chose to borrow from the Germans, hoping to escape the “debt trap” set up by the French and Britons. Yet they paid dearly for the loans, and the last leg of the railway “through the driest stretches of Anatolia carried little traffic.”

The author says the BRI seems to be meeting the same fate – a “large-scale misinvestment” with little practical gains. The project involves more than 60 countries across the Eurasian continent and Eastern Africa, accounting for more than half of the world’s population, and producing 40% of world output. In Pakistan insurgents vowed to target the BRI, until China stopped exploiting the region. Other countries had limited their broader economic relationship with Beijing for fear of “debt traps” epitomised by Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port.

During the darkest days of its sovereign-debt crisis, Greece sold 51% of Piraeus, its largest port, to the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO). It remains to be seen whether the investment is wise. But “critics have already identified a Chinese-financed bridge over the Moraca canyon in Montenegro as a classic example of a bridge to nowhere. Though it was designed to link landlocked Serbia to the Adriatic coast, it currently doesn’t connect anything at all, nor will it for the foreseeable future. It is, in other words, merely a road into debt.”

The author says Europe should also launch its own Marshall plan, since Emmanuel Macron pushed for a “European Renaissance.” The project would see Europe being “integrated not just politically but physically, through high-speed railroads, electricity grids, and oil and gas pipelines.” Indeed, this physical “connectedness” will win more hearts than the “strictly” financial globalisation, because it creates jobs and serves the wider public.