China's Belt and Road Initiative and It's International Consequences. (ePub)

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by China's CCP (Chinese Communist Party) government was established in 2013 and encompasses many countries from several continents (Hurley, et al., 2018). Using land and sea routes, the initiative is meant to stretch from China, to as far as the Latin American countries on the other side of the Pacific. The initiative is supposed to replicate the old Silk Road, however, on a grander scale. The project is often nicknamed "the New Silk Road" because of the resemblance to the original Silk Road that linked Europe and the Asian continent. The Chinese president, XI Jinping, launched the new Silk Road to connect China with countries across the world for the purpose of expanding trade relations. Due to the large size of this adventure; scholars, and historians have started to call the undertaking the Chinese Marshall Plan. The current infrastructural development is different from the old Silk Road, primarily based on size and reach. The project includes both sea and land routes and is collectively known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The initiative is a departure from China's traditional manner of conducting foreign policy. Previously, China's foreign policy was limited to trade. Therefore, the new initiative is a departure from this past and a vision of a more assertive China. Hence, while the initiative is an economic push to open up new markets for China's excess industrial capacity and consumer goods, developing new investment opportunities, there is a sense of an aggressive China, actively trying to shape international institutions and norms like never before. This bold initiative is primarily financed by loans from China's state banks to foreign governments. However, such loans should be a concern for the West, especially in Africa, where government corruption and bad governance are rampant. The fear is that these governments' inability to pay back the loans will result in a new wave of debt traps to the continent's struggling economies. This book will examine how Chinese loans are a concern for the West.