Sound policy: An employee inspecting steel rolls at a factory in Nantong, eastern Jiangsu province. The success of the BRI is due to China’s capability to provide developing countries with total solutions for infrastructure. — AFP
LONDON: The implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has improved lives throughout the Global South, experts say, contradicting “debt trap” smears the initiative has drawn from some Western media outlets.
Scholars, journalists and politicians from both developing countries, such as Pakistan, Iran and Zambia, and developed countries, including Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom, participated in the webinar titled “Building a Multipolar World – 10 years of the Belt and Road Initiative”, which was co-organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group.
Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute at Fudan University, attributed the initiative’s success to China’s “hard power” capability to provide developing countries with total solutions for traditional infrastructure, such as railways, and for digital and green infrastructure.
“It is also because of the soft power of the initiative, in which China and its partner countries discuss together, build together and benefit together,” Zhang said.
He added that the consultations include business groups, political personalities and different parties within participating countries.
Erik Solheim, president of the Green Belt and Road Institute and formerly executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, used the Mombasa-Nairobi standard gauge railway in Kenya as an example of how the BRI can benefit local people.
“I can see that 10 years of the BRI has been an astonishing success,” he said. “The background colour for the Belt and Road is green.”
He said a “watershed moment” for that green development came in 2021, when China announced it would cease investment in overseas coal-fired power plants.
“China is now the very leader of everything green,” Solheim said, saying around 60% to 80% of every green technologies are now employed in China, and that people in the West do not realise that fact because of enormous negative campaigns by many Western media organisations.
“Criticism that the Belt and Road was ‘grey’, focusing on coal and oil and gas, there wasn’t truth in that in the very beginning,” he said.
Mushahid Hussain Sayed, chairman of the Pakistan-China Institute and a senator in Pakistan, said he is already seeing an irreversible shift in the global balance of economic, political, and cultural power from the West to the East.
“About 10 years ago, when no other country was willing to invest in Pakistan as the situation was very volatile, the Chinese leadership and the Communist Party of China invested and gave a vote of confidence to the people of Pakistan,” he said.
He cited the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is one of the BRI’s flagship projects so far.
“The BRI is all about people-centric development and in this context I feel that the best of BRI is yet to come because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a 15-year project started in 2015 to 2030,” said Hussain.
He added that Pakistan’s prime minister was in Beijing last month to sign new agreements with China to develop agriculture, IT, and education.
Fred M’membe, president of Socialist Party Zambia, echoed Hussain saying there is evidence that leading players in the Global South are increasingly impatient with the underhanded way the West cast the dice in its favour in world economics. — China Daily/ANN
