From Contest for the Indo-Pacific (Rory Medcalf, 2020) pp 102-6
Follow the Maritime Silk Road
It was the first time a foreign leader had addressed the Indonesian parliament, but Xi Jinping’s speech of 2 October 2013 made waves for another reason too. ‘China and Indonesia face each other across the sea, he said, referring to historic visits by Zheng He and the ‘nice stories’ left behind. Xi went on to declare:
Southeast Asia has since ancient times been an important hub along the ancient Maritime Silk Road. China will strengthen maritime cooperation with ASEAN countries to make good use of the China-ASEAN Maritime Cooperation Fund set up by the Chinese government and vigorously develop maritime partnership in a joint effort to build the Maritime Silk Road of the 2ist century.”
The term Maritime Silk Road had suddenly entered China’s lexicon. It sounded like a big deal. A month earlier, Xi had made an analogous announcement in Astana, Kazakhstan: ‘To forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation and expand development space in the Eurasian region, we should take an innovative approach and jointly build an “economic belt along the Silk Road’**‘ Together, these two speeches framed what would soon be Xi’s signature initiative, his mark on history beyond China’s borders. It was a grand design that soon became officially known as ‘One Belt, One Road’ (Yi Dai Yi Lu in Chinese). Later, Chinese officials sought to change the English translation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in a belated effort to counter perceptions that the whole thing was precisely what it was: a China-centric vision of dominating both the land (the belt) and the sea (the road).**
Many who paid early attention to the Jakarta and Astana speeches – including China’s own bureaucrats – were baffled. Were such expansive infrastructure ambitions and messages of neighbourly goodwill really all that new? If this was primarily about economic cooperation – investment, development assistance and infrastructure – then China had been moving in this direction for years. It was already a growing investor in the region, with good reason: it had capital and others needed it. China was rising in respect and impact as a provider of aid, alongside established donors like Japan and Europe. As China’s own countryside developed, it could export infrastructure: Xi’s Jakarta speech rightly boasted of the Chinese-built bridge spanning the 5.5-kilometre sea gap between Surabaya and Madura. But some other Chinese projects had brought disappointment or controversy: unfinished oil and gas pipelines; a massive dam halted by local protests in Myanmar; shiny sports stadiums soon in disrepair.*®
Having attained the leadership less than a year before, Xi was ruthlessly consolidating his power and authority. Instead of focusing on domestic issues, he had surprised foreign observers by staking his reputation on international ambitions. Any self-preserving Chinese bureaucrat or business figure knew the new leader’s words were not to be disputed. Instead, they were to be leveraged: for Communist Party apparatchiks, provincial authorities and red capitalists alike, One Belt, One Road was one big opportunity, New initiatives could be cast as fulfilling the leader’s vision. Existing pet projects could be rebadged as having been part of it all along. Everything from ports to bridges, highways to high-speed rail, pipelines to oil refineries, through to minor building works and production plants, even a tyre factory in Serbia: it was all being labelled as part of China’s ‘project of the century’.
The Belt and Road gathered shape and pace. It was many objectives rolled into one: geoeconomics, the use of economics for national power advantage. As China’s economy began to slow, here was boundless scope to keep production going and export excess capacity, notably in steel and cement. Chinese capital could generate returns or, where recipients could not service the debt, the acquisition of far-flung assets like ports through ‘debt for equity’ swaps. Here was a chance to replace Western countries » the top of value chains, setting the standards in production and transaction that would lock in long-term advantage for Chinese manufacturers and traders. New employment beckoned for Chinese workers on sites from Asia to Africa. Another goal was the projection of Chinese soft power: an image of altruism, whether aid projects in the field or educational placements for foreigners in the motherland. But this was accompanied by harder and Sharper forms of power: influence over foreign elites, where economic leverage through debt, dependence and personal corruption could one day translate into support or silence on matters like diplomacy and defence.
Initially, the PLA was shy about what, if anything, the Belt and Road meant for security. But it soon became impossible to pretend security was Separate. The Belt and Road traced the web of China’s energy dependence, especially across the waters to Africa and the Middle East. It meant the expansion of China’s economic interests, and these would need protecting, in places far away. Moreover, the whole show coincided with the rapid modernisation of a Chinese military able and expected to deploy at distance, Above all, the journey of the BRI bandwagon converged with worsening tension between states as the United States, India, Japan and others become more openly suspicious of how Beijing intended to use its accumulating strength. The vagueness of the geography of what had begun as ‘one’ belt and road only compounded the uncertainty: different interpretations had it taking in Africa, Europe, the South Pacific, even South America. The official version, formalised in a vision document in 2015, defined the Maritime Silk Road – the seaborne part of the BRI – as crossing the South China Sea through the Indian Ocean to Europe, with a branch line from the South China Sea into the South Pacific.”
By the time the developed world finally began noticing the BRI juggernaut, it was already all things to all people. But certain messages about Xi’s China stood out. China now saw its wealth and influence as inseparable from its control of regional connectivity, and Xi saw his own legacy and the Party’s legitimacy as entangled with his expansive ambitions abroad. One European observer, Bruno Macaes, defined the Belt and Road as nothing Jess than a Chinese goal of building a new world order.** If China’s shift to the Indo-Pacific had commenced with its reliance on seaborne oil, now the infrastructure plans of the Maritime Silk Road were entwining China’s fate and ambition further with the Indian Ocean and the lands along the sea lanes.
This made it notable that, not long after President Xi began proclaiming the virtues of the BRI, China closed ranks against other visions of the region, especially the emerging Indo-Pacific formulation. In the years before Xi took the helm, Chinese academics had evinced a courageous diversity of views about their country’s interests and diplomacy. In 2010, for instance, some were frankly telling foreign counterparts — including the author – that their country’s new assertiveness in the South China Sea was wrong and counterproductive.*” Some Chinese scholars experimented with new Indo-Pacific formulations – Yin Tai in Chinese — to make sense of a changing regional order, their country’s expanding interests and ways to ensure peaceful coexistence.” In June 2013, a senior researcher for the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Minghao Zhao, even endorsed a new ‘Australian concept of ‘IndoPacific Asia, noting it:
has inspired many Chinese strategic thinkers and planners to begin to look at China’ grand strategy across a wide Indo-Pacific swath … The United States, India, Japan and other players are seeking to collaborate to build an ‘Indo-Pacific order’ … China is not necessarily excluded from this project, and it should seek a seat at the table and help recast the strategic objectives and interaction norms that bind all participating states.”
But shortly afterwards, One Belt, One Road became the Communist Party orthodoxy, and other nations’ visions of regional order became unwelcome. China’s official line was now to reject the Indo-Pacific concept as an American or Japanese plot to co-opt India and exclude China from the regional order, even though the Maritime Silk Road was the same region by another name.
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