Parallax Visions of the Belt and Road Initiative

Daniel Markey's China's Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia offers an important, original, and timely analysis of one of our time's most significant geopolitical transitions, as the People's Republic of China (PRC) evolves from an East Asian power to a global power. It is the type of comprehensive book that many would shy away from given its vast territorial coverage, and Markey should be commended for his ambitious undertaking. The result is an informed and engaging work that analyzes China's foreign policy as well as those of several states across South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. As China's interests and influence spreads, we need a clearer picture of the PRC's foreign policy objectives, and to understand the PRC in the Xi Jinping era, we have to start with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The second chapter, "Beijing's Global Aspirations," capably articulates the motivations of Chinese policymakers in developing BRI, putting it in the context of a foreign policy that has grown increasingly confident and ambitious. Perhaps the most important contribution of Markey's book is its emphasis on the agency of countries partnering with China in BRI projects—a part of the BRI story that is sometimes neglected. In nearly every bilateral relationship, excepting only the Sino-U.S. relationship, China's economic leverage creates asymmetry that contributes to a sense of the PRC marching toward dominance while taking advantage of weaker states' needs for development loans and FDI. China's emergence as a funding source represents a challenge to the liberal Western model, which has become increasingly irrelevant to many countries' infrastructure projects. David Dollar, formerly of the World Bank, has compared the Western model's limitations when measured against BRI:

Only about 30 percent of World Bank lending is for infrastructure these days. Having run the largest infrastructure program in the World Bank, I can say that it's extraordinarily bureaucratic. Mostly, clients don't like to come the World Bank because it's just too time consuming. It takes many, many years to get things going. China is offering to finance infrastructure, not at highly concessional terms, at what we would generally call commercial terms, but frankly at interest rates that most of these countries could not get from any other lender, unless they jumped through the hoops to go with the World Bank.¹

The English-language narrative about BRI is often dangerously simplistic: China is using its economic might to overturn the liberal order through massive loans and infrastructure projects primarily designed to strengthen its own economy. Developed by Chinese state-owned enterprises, monitored by Chinese technology, and staffed with Chinese labor, the result is environmental degradation, the spread of an illiberal surveillance state model, unfair labor practices, and crippling debt. Partnering countries accept these adversities as the price of doing business with China. The implication is that with relatively little practical experience in dealing with the PRC, these smaller states do not know what they are getting themselves into. However, this perspective reflects a Western view of BRI in general, and a U.S. view in particular. China's Western Horizon illuminates how this process looks from the perspective of Eurasian countries working with China, explaining the motivations to forge closer ties and take on these loans and providing a more nuanced approach to BRI than we normally get from great-power competition analysis.

An important theme throughout the book is that elites in partner countries adopt a logic reflecting pressures at the domestic or regional level. The chapter on South Asia offers the best illustration—not surprising given Markey's background in the region. The book begins with an interview with former Pakistani prime minister Pervez Musharraf discussing Gwadar port, the anchor of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): "'Yes, Gwadar was entirely my idea, not a Chinese idea. I was concerned only about Pakistan's strategic interests'" (p. vii). This is an important but underreported aspect of BRI—local projects in need of funding are often folded into BRI cooperation. In Oman, for example...