The Economist: China’s Belt and Road Initiative is booming

In a Trump-troubled world, China’s leader still sees opportunities in poor countries

CHINA’S LEADER, Xi Jinping, sees difficult times ahead. At a conclave of the Communist Party’s most senior officials that ended on October 23rd he warned that over the next five years the task of ensuring China’s development while maintaining its security would become “much harder” amid a “notable rise in uncertainties and unforeseen factors”. Mr Xi’s meeting a week later in South Korea with President Donald Trump produced an uneasy truce in the two countries’ fight over trade. But it will not have eased Mr Xi’s biggest headache: America. The cure for Trumpian instability, as he sees it, is an alternative order that draws the rest of the world closer into China’s orbit.

Enter the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Not so long ago, some a***ysts wondered whether China might wind down this colossal infrastructure-building scheme, to which most of the 130 or so poor or developing countries collectively known as the global south have signed up. Mr Xi launched the scheme in 2013, aiming to boost growth and trade by building ports, railways, power plants and so on (and to land big deals for Chinese state firms, which got many of the contracts). The BRI was soon beset by claims that it was crippling countries with debt and damaging the environment. China began scaling back its loans. Yet though BRI activity ebbed during the pandemic, it has picked up sharply since 2023, reaching record levels. It is also helping to stimulate trade between China and the global south, expanding markets for Chinese goods that Mr Trump’s tariffs are pricing out of America.
First, look at the trade numbers. America is still the single biggest destination for Chinese exports of goods. Yet its share of China’s shipments has fallen sharply since trade tensions soared during Mr Trump’s first term as president, from nearly 20% in the first nine months of 2018 to less than 12% in the same period this year. The global south is taking up the slack. Year-on-year exports to ten members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) grew by 15% in September, as they did to countries in Latin America. China’s exports to Africa jumped by nearly 57%. According to S&P Global, the global south took 44% of China’s exports in 2024, up from 35% in 2015. The financial-data firm reckons this group of countries also accounts for more than half of China’s global trade surplus. (America’s share of the surplus is 36%.)

Then consider BRI activities. These often involve projects that encourage trade. A Chinese factory built in a foreign country, for example, may rely on components or machinery shipped from China. It can thrive in local markets, or sometimes even in America’s by making goods appear to originate from a country other than China and thus evading China-related tariffs. In 2023, the first full year after China abandoned its long “zero-covid” policy, the total value of BRI investments and construction contracts was $92.4bn, according to a report by Christoph Nedopil of Griffith University in Australia in collaboration with the Green Finance and Development Centre at Fudan University in Shanghai (the report counts any Chinese state or private investment, as well as construction contracts, in countries that have joined the scheme as BRI “engagement”—China does not publish an official list of BRI projects). This was still below pre-covid levels, but a big rebound from the pandemic era (up from $74.5bn in 2022). In 2024 and 2025, BRI engagement surged. The rise of 30% in 2024, to nearly $122bn, was the largest increase in a single year in the history of the scheme. In the first half of this year the record was broken again, with more than $123bn of engagement, nearly double the same period in 2024, Mr Nedopil calculated.

In 2021, responding to widespread misgivings about the BRI, Mr Xi declared that it would shift to a new “small but beautiful” approach: less splurging on concrete-consuming infrastructure, and more spending on projects relating to health care, green energy, telecommunications and more; there would be no new Chinese investment abroad in coal-fired power. Yet in the past couple of years some BRI deals have been anything but small or beautiful. Of $39bn of BRI money directed to Africa in the first half of this year, a single deal accounted for nearly half: a $20bn contract awarded to a Chinese state firm for building oil and gas facilities in Nigeria. By value, fossil fuels now dominate in BRI-related energy projects. Another large slice has involved construction deals in Kazakhstan worth nearly $20bn involving copper and aluminium production.

Such megadeals involving state-owned companies mask another, more welcome trend, however: a surge in BRI activity, often involving non-state firms, in just the kinds of business that Mr Xi promised to encourage. Last year their overseas investments in solar, wind and waste-fuelled power amounted to $11.8bn. This 24% rise made it the greenest year in the BRI’s history, according to Mr Nedopil. Chinese firms poured in another $9.7bn in the first half of this year.

All this is not just a fillip for Chinese firms facing turbulence from Mr Trump’s tariffs. As Mr Xi sees it, the BRI pays geopolitical dividends too. Since 2013 it has involved more than $1.3trn of Chinese investments and contracts in 150 countries. China hopes that this money will encourage countries to back it in multinational forums, starting with the UN. For instance, 70-odd countries have already adopted language promoted by China that declares that “all efforts” should be made to achieve unification with Taiwan—implying that military force is acceptable. Most of these countries are signed up to the BRI.

There are also risks for China. Just as rich countries worry about the harm to their industries caused by a flood of cheap goods from China, so members of the global south have misgivings too. Many BRI countries are seeing their trade deficits with China widen. Protectionist mutterings are growing louder in both Africa and South-East Asia. Reckless Chinese lending in earlier years leaves a sting, too. A report in May by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney, said China had “transitioned from capital provider to net financial drain” on developing-country budgets, as debt-servicing costs on belt-and-road projects in the 2010s now “far outstrip new loan disbursements”. The institute warned that these repayments could mean rising vulnerability to debt in many countries, especially in Africa. Key spending priorities like health, education, reducing poverty and adapting to climate change all risk being crowded out.

Yet China knows that with these countries it has a captive audience. Some may quietly grumble about trade imbalances or debt, but the technology and construction skills offered by China are often hard to find elsewhere. China hopes such countries see little choice other than to support it in its desire to be the architect of an alternative world order. As a Communist Party journal recently put it, the BRI will help create “a new paradigm of global governance”. In a Trump-troubled world, Mr Xi sees opportunities still.

you know theyre gonna spin this as cold and heartless trade practice performed by growth-possessed unimaginative chinese bureaucracy

The way people feel about UFOs from perfect harmonious alien societies coming to Earth to save us from misery and self destruction is basically how I feel about the Chinese

I see BYDs everyday

they'd both let our generation shrivel and die before helping us make things right and i hate them both for it

Why Trump’s cuts to scientific research are a big win for China - Washington Post free link

Highlights

• Over the past decade, there has been a rush of scholars — many with some family connection to China — moving across the Pacific, drawn by Beijing’s full-throttle drive to become a scientific superpower. But Donald Trump’s return to the White House has turbocharged this effort. The Trump administration has cut billions in science funding, canceled grants for some of America’s most elite universities, revoked international student visas and hiked up costs for highly skilled H-1B visas.

• The slashing of science funding, combined with the increased scrutiny scientists of Chinese descent have faced in the United States, has boosted Beijing’s efforts to attract top-tier talent and cement its position as a center of global science.

• “The U.S. is increasingly skeptical of science — whether it’s climate, health or other areas,” said Jimmy Goodrich, an expert on Chinese science and technology at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. “While in China, science is being embraced as a key solution to move the country forward into the future.”

• Beijing is spending big in its recruitment drive: The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the central scientific research funding agency, is devoting an increasingly large share of its $8 billion annual budget to talent programs. Individual provinces, cities and universities are rolling out the recruitment red carpet.

• Beijing also introduced a new K visa last month to attract young, foreign STEM talent. The visa has, however, been controversial, especially among young graduates who don’t want foreign competition as they struggle to find work in a tough economy.

• Although the U.S. maintains many advantages as a long-standing global research hub and is still a magnet for many ambitious scientists, China is rapidly catching up.

• Terence Tao, a celebrated UCLA mathematician sometimes called the “Mozart of Math,” recently had $26 million of U.S. National Science Foundation grants suspended. Though the grants were later reinstated, Tao, who was born in Australia, said universities in China had since been in touch, trying to lure him there.

• Nowhere is more central to China’s scientific ambitions than Shenzhen. In the fishing village turned tech metropolis in southern China, researchers from all over the world are being drawn to state-of-the-art research facilities and expanding university campuses, with ample resources and proximity to China’s most innovative companies, like the telecommunications giant Huawei.

• The dramatic move paid off for Ferguson, who said he felt a growing “cultural rejection” of science in America before he left. He receives five funding streams in addition to his salary — which is more than he was offered in the U.S. — to cover research and living expenses, including a grant from Guangdong province and from the NSFC, he said.

• Even with this special treatment, foreign scientists without previous connections to China face lifestyle adjustments and cultural hurdles. Researchers with long histories in the U.S., for instance, sometimes face suspicion and exclusion from career opportunities, said Zhao, the economist. “As a result, their numbers remain small and their influence limited — often, after some time working in China, they feel constrained and eventually choose to leave.”

The worrisome thing about the collapse of American science and universities is that no other country has the capacity to fill the research void left in its wake (at least not for a long time).

crazy because i swear mid 10s was the height of anti china s*** with uyghurs and all

but i thought chinese kids were all studying in the US

Plenty still are but its been declining since 2020

Everyone should be doing this. Let's break the banks!

Tbf theyre flat at a high level

always found it absolutely hilarious how european countries would move their production facilities to china and then their governments would in the same breath talk about how polluted and environmentally damaging china production is b**** you did that

we gettin that book club going or what?

1658 pages

This looks really interesting though, might look for a PDF to skim through

@WRU bars

"Those who play with fire will perish by it"

Sanae Takaichi needs to meet Shinzo Abe

"On Saturday, Xue Jian, China's consul general in the Japanese city of Osaka, reshared a news article about Takaichi's parliamentary remarks on X. But he also added his own comment that "the dirty head that sticks itself in must be cut off"

damn this all started because Sanae Takaichi said if China attacked Taiwan, it could count as a "survival-threatening situation" and Japan may intervene

A "survival-threatening situation" is a legal term under Japan's 2015 security law, referring to when an armed attack on its allies poses an existential threat to Japan. In such a situation, Japan's self-defence forces can be activated to respond to the threat.

Said all this only to abstain and allow it to pass

Terrible