"High-Profile Infrastructure And China’s Global Influence Gamble" - By CWP Alum Austin Strange
Observers frequently contend that China’s international influence is growing in lockstep with its economic rise. This includes the US Department of State, which recently suggested that after four decades of rapid growth, China’s ‘global reach and international influence have expanded accordingly’ (Office of the Secretary of State 2020: 40). While scholars in international relations and other fields have been more cautious, policy and popular debates have shed nuance in favour of a linear narrative that pegs China’s influence to its global investments (Goh 2016; Kastner and Pearson 2021).
Within this narrative, grandiose infrastructure projects along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—introduced in 2013 to promote connectivity across an overland ‘belt’ through Eurasia and a maritime ‘road’ through the Indo-Pacific—are important sites for Chinese influence generation. In 2018, US vice-president Mike Pence declared that China is ‘offering hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure loans to governments from Asia to Africa to Europe and even Latin America’, of which ‘the benefits invariably flow overwhelmingly to Beijing’ (Pence 2018). The first part of Pence’s statement is accurate. As Figure 1 shows, since 2000, the Chinese Government has committed tens of billions of dollars annually to infrastructure projects in developing countries. More than two-thirds of China’s development finance—which includes aid and less-concessional, debt-based financing—has funded transportation, energy, and industrial projects.
Austin Strange is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines China’s contemporary and historical roles in the world economy and global development. He is the co-author of Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and has recently published articles in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Contemporary China.
Photo Credit: By David Brossard, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30009005
