The BRI and its discontents

Bertil Lintner has spent decades reporting on Southeast Asia and its borderlands with India and China. He has deep familiarity with the history of the India-China conflictual relations and its current dynamic in this region. His latest book, The End of the Chinese Century?, uses the trajectory of China's most ambitious global development project—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—to assess its claim to be the superpower of the 21st century.

- SHYAM SARAN

Bertil Lintner has spent decades reporting on Southeast Asia and its borderlands with India and China. He has deep familiarity with the history of the India-China conflictual relations and its current dynamic in this region. His latest book, The End of the Chinese Century?, uses the trajectory of China's most ambitious global development project—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—to assess its claim to be the superpower of the 21st century.

The BRI has been compared to the US Marshall Plan launched after the end of the Second World War to enable the recovery of the war-ravaged economies of western Europe. But China's BRI is global in its scope and backed by large-scale resources. BRI is focused mainly on large infrastructure projects, particularly those that promote connectivity, access to sources of supply and access to markets. China's objective has been to hard-wire the world with itself as the central node in the emerging transport and communications network.

Mr. Lintner's survey of BRI projects a decade since the initiative was announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, delivers a negative report card. This is too sweeping a judgment. He deals mainly with the fate of Asian, African, and some Latin American Chinese-financed projects. But in Europe, the Chinese purchase of the Piraeus port in Greece and linking it through modern rail and highway with the heart of Europe is both an economic and strategic success story. The transformation of Hungary as a freight and distribution center for China-Europe trade is a major long-term transport and logistics hub for China.