What has the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) contributed to global development? How does the BRI fit into the bigger picture of globalization today? Beijing Review reporter Tao Xing spoke to Maria Adele Carrai, an assistant professor of Global China Studies at New York University Shanghai, about the BRI's development. Edited excerpts from their conversation follow:  

Beijing Review: What are your views on the BRI? 

Maria Adele Carrai: What the BRI reflects is a manifestation of global China. It's an attempt of China to globalize as well as a combination of China going global and the push for Chinese companies to go abroad, internationalize and integrate with the global market. The BRI is a big label, a sort of umbrella, under which many different initiatives and projects take place. It is not a strategy of China plotting to conquer the world, but it is definitely a China-led initiative.

One of the goals is really to reach the European market by land and sea. But the focus of the BRI is the developing world. That's true.

The Global South is particularly important for China, both for political and economic reasons. China has promoted South-South relations through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms.

China's expanding economic cooperation with other countries across the Global South has gone hand in hand with a decline of the neoliberal model of development, which seems incapable of generating new growth momentum.

China in the developing world, in the Global South, is seen as a successful story that is more aligned, as in having similar experiences as the Global South and still able to develop so successfully in the past decades. Many countries in the Global South see China as an example, as a model, as a possibility. 

Take the case of Africa. Africa has been seen as kind of a lost continent, with a lot of resources. But now China comes in, in a much less paternalistic way than the West, and talks about win-win cooperation and equality, which is positive. The BRI is one of the prominent sources of development finance in Africa.

It's true, though, that a lot of countries, including some in Africa, are in debt to China and the COVID-19 pandemic made the situation even worse for these countries to pay China back. But it's definitely not a trap. China is not really plotting to put these countries into debt and taking assets away from them. But then again, the picture on the ground is quite mixed and nuanced.

What are your opinions on deglobalization and decoupling? What difficulties would these pose to the BRI? 

Today, this initiative is a bit challenged because the conflict in Ukraine and the pandemic have slowed down the process of globalization.

Some people today say we're in a phase of deglobalization. The U.S. is also trying to decouple from China. The European Union not so much—for now. But the latter is thinking, "we need to take a step back and decrease our reliance on the Chinese market and supply chain" as the pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine exposed supply chain vulnerability.

There is this attempt from the West to decouple and deglobalize to some extent, at least to get China out of the supply chain. But the world is not necessarily following this Cold War mentality. Plus, many countries are unwilling and unable to decouple from China. Even for the U.S., it's very difficult to decouple—and perhaps impossible to fully decouple.

The BRI will be hit by this type of thinking. But even so, the decoupling and deglobalization mentality will not win over globalization. Globalization is still a very strong trend.

What are your expectations for the BRI in the post-pandemic era? 

During the pandemic, some people saw the BRI as a dead thing, saying "the pandemic is destroying everything, the BRI will disappear." But the initiative is here to stay.

Among scholars in the Global South or Europe, so much has already been discussed and imagined about the BRI. I think in moving forward, [we will see] some trends that already existed before the pandemic but were just kind of accelerated. There will be more focus on quality rather than quantity.

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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