Seven years have passed since the Chinese Communist government initiated and led the so-called Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) transnational economic belt in 2013 and began implementing it in 2014. In the intervening seven years, the international community has gained a clearer understanding of the Communist Party’s massive plan to link the continent, Central Asia, North and West Asia, the Indian Ocean coast, the Mediterranean coast, South America, and the Atlantic Ocean region through which the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road historically traveled. We have a clearer understanding of the project. At a time when the world situation is becoming increasingly chaotic and the Chinese Communist regime is in turmoil, this plan of the Chinese Communist Party is not only mired in its own quagmire, but its wolfish ambition and motives behind it are also becoming increasingly evident. The international community has a clear understanding of what the CCP’s Belt and Road is really about, and what the CCP’s purpose is in engaging in it. The question that arises is whether the goals and methods of confrontation that countries are currently proposing will really be effective, and what are the truly effective and correct methods?
The “Belt and Road” (Silk Road Economic Belt) starts from mainland China and follows the land-based Silk Road through Central Asia and Russia to Europe. The ostensible purpose of the CCP is to develop new economic cooperation with countries and regions along the route and to strengthen the infrastructure along the road. But the real motivation of the CCP is to digest the excess capacity and labor in mainland China, to promote the development of the west, and to ensure the energy supply of the mainland. There are also geopolitical and security reasons for the Communist Party’s “One Belt”.
“The mainland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are all on the Silk Road in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The five SCO observer states and three dialogue partners are also along the Silk Road. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party is actually using its economy and interests to consolidate and strengthen the SCO, which was originally a security pact. The “One Road” of the Belt and Road (21st Century Maritime Silk Road) is designed to deepen cooperation between mainland China and ASEAN and to strengthen China’s presence in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. As of March 2021, China has signed 200 cooperation documents on the Belt and Road with 141 countries and 31 international organizations.
The Silk Road Fund, which supports and finances the Belt and Road Initiative, began with a $40 billion contribution from the Chinese government to finance infrastructure, development, and industrial cooperation projects, and in 2017, the Chinese government increased its contribution to the fund by 100 billion yuan instead of U.S. dollars. In October 2014, 21 countries, including the Communist Party of China, India, and Singapore, signed a memorandum of understanding in Beijing to establish the ADB. in March 2015, the United Kingdom became the first Western country to express interest in joining the ADB as a founding member. Subsequently, France, Italy and Germany followed suit. The United States and Japan, on the other hand, have refused to join the Belt and Road since the beginning.
As the Belt and Road unfolded, the Communist Party of China and Pakistan were the first to undertake a series of large-scale projects to become the hub and flagship of the Belt and Road. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is 3,000 kilometers long with an investment of $46 billion. During Xi Jinping’s visit to Pakistan, China and Pakistan signed cooperation agreements and MOUs on 51 projects. The CCP also invested $50 billion to build five reservoirs and hydropower plants in Pakistan’s Indus River Basin, with electricity accounting for two-thirds of the country’s total hydropower. China and Pakistan are also actively promoting the construction of the Gwadar-Xinjiang road corridor, giving the CCP direct access to the Indian Ocean. Then, in January 2018, Pakistan’s central bank announced that bilateral trade between mainland China and Pakistan could be settled through the yuan, abandoning the dollar settlement and opening up the use of the yuan to replace the dollar in financing projects, also making the CCP’s foreign exchange pressure significantly less.
To increase its influence in the energy sector in Eastern Europe, the CCP has led infrastructure development in Southeast Europe, including ports, roads, railroads and power stations, and has also lent money to related projects through Chinese-funded commercial banks. China is using the Greek port of Piraeus as a hub for land and sea cargo from along the Belt and Road to build a “Balkan Silk Road”. China also intends to invest heavily in energy projects in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and other Eastern European countries.
For Europe, the CCP has launched an international intermodal train, the China-Europe Class Train, to strengthen business and trade ties with European countries. The intermodal train travels from 28 Chinese cities, including Xi’an, Chongqing, Zhengzhou and Chengdu, to 29 cities in 11 European countries, including Milan, Moscow, Minsk and Hamburg. The Chinese Communist Party emphasizes that the China-European train runs in three quarters of the time and is about one-fifth of the price of air transport, but deliberately conceals the obvious limitations that the China-European train, while saving time and price compared to sea transport, is nowhere near the price of sea transport or the efficiency of air transport.
The Chinese Communist Party wanted to break through to the EU countries individually, but Germany, France, Spain and the UK have shown “a high degree of solidarity” with the Belt and Road Initiative, and the EU believes it can demonstrate its common position and sign the agreement collectively. “The EU believes it can demonstrate its common position and sign the Belt and Road Memorandum of Understanding (BRI) collectively, without allowing the CCP to cooperate with China bilaterally (signed by each EU country and China). The EU’s defensiveness against the CCP’s ambitions was shown as early as 2019.
The CCP’s ambition and brutal, overbearing mentality was on full display when the program was dovetailed with the Indian Ocean countries. The Chinese Communist Party led the plan to establish a seaport in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, with the first phase of the port starting in November 2010 at a cost of US$361 million for construction, with China Exim Bank contributing 85% of the cost and a 99-year lease. But later, due to the insolvency of the Sri Lankan government, Sri Lanka officially handed over the Hambantota port to China under this 99-year long lease. The true face of the Chinese Communist Party’s greed and implementation of control has shocked and awakened the world.
The Chinese Communist Party’s Belt and Road with Southeast Asian countries has also met resistance. Previously, the Chinese government actively promoted the negotiation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) to strengthen economic and trade ties with Southeast Asian countries. After the implementation of the Belt and Road, the CCP sought to build a “Trans-Asian Railway” to connect China with Southeast Asian countries. However, the suspicion and dissatisfaction of Southeast Asian countries with the CCP is reflected in projects such as the Sino-Thai Railway, the Lebetang copper mine in Myanmar, and the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka. Leaders of the countries are suspicious of the CCP, resulting in contracts being continually overturned and renegotiated.
The 840-kilometer high-speed rail project between China and Thailand was signed in September 2015; the rail project between China and Laos, a 418-kilometer high-speed rail line from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, was signed in October 2015; and the agreement between China Railway Corporation and Indonesia’s Vika Corporation to form a joint venture to build and operate the Yavan high-speed rail project was signed in November 2015. In the Lao section, the Mawan Railway, on the other hand, is scheduled to open in December 2021.In August 2017, China participated in the construction of the East Coast Railway and West Coast Sunilong High Speed Rail in Malaysia, but after Mahathir was elected as Malaysia’s prime minister in 2018, he overturned the rail project and announced renegotiations. Mahathir also announced in May of that year that he would cancel the Sunilong High Speed Rail project. in September 2018, Mahathir decided to cancel three Chinese-funded oil and gas transmission pipeline projects with a total cost of about $2.8 billion.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) has pursued the Belt and Road from its earliest aims of broadening China’s foreign trade market, exporting excess production capacity, exporting the CPC’s infrastructure model, exporting unemployment, and obtaining stable energy supplies, to gradually expanding to occupying strategic locations, building geopolitical alliances, uniting Europe against the United States, exporting communist ideology, and finally promoting communist dictatorship to the world, a comprehensive and both political, economic and military purposes. The Belt and Road has 46 countries signed up in Africa, 38 countries involved in Asia, 27 countries involved in Europe, 12 countries included in Oceania, and 19 countries included in Central and South America. But as Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has shown, Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative has been hampered by a sharp decline in mainland China’s foreign exchange reserves; its massive debt has also placed a heavy burden on the economy.
The aim of the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative is to move towards a dominant position in global affairs and to establish a trade network centered on mainland China, with the intention of promoting the process of “globalization” and confronting the control of the world economy by the Western capitalist countries led by the United States. It is also intended to confront the control of the world economy by the U.S.-led Western capitalist countries, and to build a new international trade and economic system based on the CCP’s status as the “world factory. The CCP denies that the Belt and Road Initiative is a “Chinese version of the Marshall Plan” because it does not have the original intent of the Marshall Plan to aid Europe and confront communism. The Communist Party has successfully convinced the UK to join the plan because it addresses the concerns of the British economy due to the uncertainty of the UK’s foreign trade after leaving the EU single market.
The United States opposes the Communist Party’s Belt and Road Initiative because it apparently seeks to drive U.S. power away from the Western Pacific. A study published by the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of China says the Belt and Road is clearly aimed at the U.S. situation in the Pacific and would strategically marginalize Taiwan. Indian officials have already stated that because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor would cross Pakistani-controlled Kashmir (an area under Pakistan’s effective control), the plan would affect India’s interests and territorial claims along Kashmir. India refused to participate in the Belt and Road Summit on May 14, 2017, and warned of the “unsustainable debt burden” of other countries participating in the plan. According to a 2018 report by the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., 23 of the 68 countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative are already heavily indebted, while eight others are at risk of becoming so. According to the German Institute for Economic Research (IW) in Cologne, the Belt and Road not only imposes a huge debt burden on developing countries, but also puts a lot of financial pressure on China itself.
What is the right way for the international community to fight against the Communist Party’s Belt and Road, and is the way for countries to fight against it effective?
India has proposed the so-called “Monsoon Plan” and the “Spice Road” to fight against the Chinese Communist Party; the United States has conceived a “democratic version of the Belt and Road” – a new proposal of the Biden administration. The Biden administration’s new proposal has been mocked by Chinese netizens; the U.K. and U.S. will create a global plan to counter the Communist Party’s Belt and Road; and the U.S. and Japan plan to develop alternatives in the Indo-Pacific to counterbalance the Belt and Road.
The U.S. and Japan have plans to support the development of high-quality infrastructure, including 5G networks and hydrogen energy, in the Indo-Pacific region and elsewhere to counterbalance the Communist Party’s Belt and Road initiative. By setting out a clear framework for business, the two countries hope to win the trust of countries in the region and gain an advantage in the competition with the Chinese Communist Party for influence in the Indo-Pacific region. The U.S. and Japan hope that this high-quality infrastructure guide, along with procurement standards and maintenance rules, will minimize the risk of technology leakage and defeat the Chinese Communist Party. Australia also hopes to join in, setting up a cooperative project between Australia, Japan and the U.S. to promote stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.
At the end of March, when the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Canada imposed sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights violations in Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party “countersanctioned” the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. This absurd counter-attack angered the U.K. and the U.S. As tensions between the West and the CCP escalated, U.S. and British leaders said they would join with democratic countries to launch an initiative to counter the CCP’s “One Belt, One Road” plan. Details of the counterweight plan are not yet available, but British Prime Minister Johnson agreed in a conference call with Biden to provide hundreds of millions of pounds in support for the initiative. The UK may consider expelling Chinese Communist spies, which is also listed in the plan.
Communist think tanks have been suggesting for some time that the Chinese authorities should use the epidemic and the Belt and Road Initiative to “harvest the dollar hegemony” and “become the center of the world. They have even used the epidemic and the “Belt and Road” to promote the internationalization of the RMB to replace the “American Dream”. Thus, it is clear that the international community should confront the Chinese Communist Party, completely remove the influence of the “Belt and Road”, and further dismantle the Chinese Communist Party, eliminating its dangerous influence on all countries in the world, the international economic and trade order, and even the world peace and stability – the Chinese Communist regime. There is no time to lose!
Specifically, the U.S. and Japanese countermeasure plans, which favor only the technical aspects of 5G and new energy construction, are not enough to stop the CCP’s Huawei’s assault in this area. The U.S. and Japan have the ability and technology to use satellite technology like the Starlink program to directly capture new 5G and even 6G standards and facilities, leaving the CCP far behind. India’s Monsoon Plan and Spice Road lack sufficient teeth and strength to slow down the impact of the CCP in Pakistan at best, but not to pose a lethal threat to the CCP. India must more actively join the U.S.-sponsored Indo-Pacific Alliance, launch a full-scale attack on the CCP, and abandon its dependence on Russian weapons to fully integrate with the West and become a market and driver of the new international trade system. Britain’s plan to take national security into account is commendable. In addition to continuing to pressure the CCP on Xinjiang and Hong Kong, Britain and the United States should more aggressively promote Taiwan’s status and power so that a free China can become the nemesis of the authoritarian CCP.
The U.S. and its allies must also go deeper in going after the CCP on the Wuhan plague and virus, and even push for claims to make the CCP regime completely bankrupt. As for economically bankrupting the CCP so that it cannot use investment and money as bait to attract countries to join the Belt and Road and carry heavy burdens, it remains for the U.S. government to continue its Trump era national policy of cutting off the CCP’s black hand in the economy and continue to put strong pressure on the CCP in all areas of tariffs, trade, technology, and human rights in order to pull the plug and finally cause the collapse of the CCP regime, thus ending the absurdity of the Belt and Road The Chinese people’s burden will be relieved.
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