An aspect of the BRI mentioned in the literature review indicated that one of the BRI’s major social components relate to national security, particularly to counter any autonomous or secession movements in China’s restive Tibet and Xinjiang regions. And as the risk analysis in Chapter 5 pointed out, the BRI is also further connecting China with regions that have Muslim majorities and thus Islamic extremist groups that have been involved with acts of terrorism in western China. From a certain point of view, the BRI is not a significant departure from which China handles domestic social issues with
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regards to western China. Just as it was with the Western Development Strategy, China’s primary blueprint towards managing the restive provinces is to increase economic activity and thus increase standards of living. It does not seem to signify any meaningful departure from existing social policies, and Beijing seems to be continuing to “buy”
social stability with economic gains. However, there should be some expectations of further capacity-building in terms of national security and national defense by connecting western China to these regions. Such capacity-building includes the development of a blue-water navy capable of safeguarding the “unlimited” scope of China’s overseas interests, as seen with the evacuation of its nationals from Libya and Yemen during periods of civil war and unrest. It will likely also include further counterterrorism and intelligence safeguards a potential future increase of attacks in western China, prominent among them being the 2014 Kunming knife attack.
In the short-term, specifically within the scope of China’s fifth-generation leadership, the international implications of the BRI are largely benign, although with points of concern. Ultimately, between the distant promise of an ambiguous new sphere of influence with China at its center and the more immediate outlet of China’s industrial overcapacity, the Xi administration will choose the latter, although this does not suggest the former is not simultaneously achievable. While the BRI and AIIB, and perhaps future trade agreements like the FTAAP and RCEP, may shift the balance of influence in Asia, present Chinese concerns ultimately mean it’s unlikely that the Xi administration can form any significant challenge to the current international order, even if it continues to dominate as the regional heavyweight. At the same time, however, the fifth-generation
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leadership is certainly setting up the groundwork for it, gambling on the chance that the BRI and, more comprehensively, the necessary reforms will ultimately succeed in shorter order. These ambitions are ultimately tied closely together.
What the BRI can presently do, however, and what should be of concern to relevant polities in China’s neighborhood, is affect ongoing trends in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. Claims from India suggesting that China is ultimately engaged in neocolonialism may be exaggerated, but they ultimately stem from the questionable sustainability of Chinese investments and projects in unorthodox investment targets in Central Asia and Pakistan, which face significant economic and political risks. Central Asian states and Pakistan are thus fundamentally taking a gamble: They have identified infrastructure development as the necessary stepping stone to strengthen their own economies, but they risk these projects managed by Chinese enterprises to be of little net value to domestic labor while also ultimately falling into debt with China if loans prove non-performing, as seen most starkly with Venezuela.
China’s more cautious neighbors will also need to consider how China will affect their IPE rubric. While Russia and ASEAN publicly support the BRI, the former remains concerned over Chinese influence over Asian geopolitics and the latter is slowly finding itself to be in increased economic competition with China; India opposes the BRI outright, and its Japanese allies will remain concerned over Chinese moves interpreted as potentially aggressive. While Chinese foreign policy, as seen with the rhetoric surrounding the BRI, discourages interpretations of international relations being a
zero-98
sum game, the avoidance of tensions requires its neighbors to believe in the same, even as Asia transforms from a multipolar region of relatively balanced polities to that of an increasingly unbalance region with drastically increasing Chinese influence.
Ultimately, the grand rhetoric and vision of the BRI is multifaceted and ambitious in scope, using a single coherent strategy by which to complement China’s attempts to address many of its concerns at once, which include energy, security, defense, and soft power. Ultimately, however, the BRI needs to overcome its first hurdle along with the fifth-generation leadership’s other policies: It ultimately needs to address economic and industrial reforms, as well as increasing wealth inequality, and it needs to do so with increasingly pressing urgency. It follows a series of gambles made by generations of Chinese leaders. Deng and the second-generation leadership believed that they could open up the Chinese economy to the world without destabilizing the country. Jiang and the third-generation leadership believed that they could decrease the power of SOEs while significantly investing in western China. Hu and the fourth-generation believed that they needed to postpone significant reforms, and first build up sufficient wealth and economic power to create a sufficiently large margin of error to address any unexpected crises to arise from aforementioned reforms. Ultimately, Xi and the fifth-generation’s gamble is that they can utilize tools of foreign policy and international connectivity to address the problems that have accumulated over generations of Chinese leadership.
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