WSJ What’s News
How China’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Bet Undercuts U.S. Dominance
Sun, 23 Feb 2025
In great-power rivalries, it matters who's on your side. Twelve years since launching its Belt and Road infrastructure project, Beijing has funneled a trillion-plus dollars into projects in some 150 countries, literally planting its flag around the globe and acquiring a growing roster of economic and diplomatic partners in the process. In the first episode of our three-part series, “Building Influence,” the WSJ’s Gabriele Steinhauser and Lingling Wei, Boston University’s Kevin Gallagher and Stanford’s Eyck Freymann explain how the program has bolstered China’s economic security and given it a platform to cut deals that challenge Western-led norms and counterbalance U.S. influence. Luke Vargas hosts. Further Reading: China Shores Up Ties With Africa Despite Slowing Economy and Friction Over Debt How China Capitalized on U.S. Indifference in Latin America China’s Global Mega-Projects Are Falling Apart Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is the Belt and Road Initiative significant in global politics?
As the competition between China and the West, especially the United States, intensifies, it really is important how big your friend circle is.
That's the journal's chief China correspondent Lingling Wei. And she's far from alone in noting that in the great power rivalry between the U.S. and China, it matters who's on your side. whose network of trade partners is growing, who's able to call in diplomatic favors, and whose financial rules and political norms are being adopted.
For years, Washington's been either indifferent or inconsistent in its dealings with wide swaths of the globe. At times, it's actively tested the patience of its longtime partners by going back and forth on international deals like the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran Nuclear Agreement. China, meanwhile, has been building influence.
A highway in Pakistan, a new seaport in Sri Lanka.
China's signature foreign policy outreach project.
China and Latin America are getting closer together. Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya. A hydropower plant in Uganda, a motorway in Serbia. South Africa, Mozambique, Nigeria and Uganda are all on board.
Since 2013, China's massive infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative has funneled a trillion plus dollars to projects from mines and highways to smart cities and industrial parks in some 150 countries, literally planting the Chinese flag around the globe. trace a graph of China's spending dating back to the launch of Belt and Road.
And starting in 2018, you will notice its loans began to drop off and they remain a lot lower than they were just five years ago. That could mean the Belt and Road went astray. But what if it means it's already succeeded in growing its influence and getting a leg up on the U.S. in the process?
I'm Luke Vargas, and as we'll explore in this three-part What's News Sunday series, looking at China's infrastructure building activities around the world, the Belt and Road hasn't all been smooth sailing. But over the first decade of the project, Beijing built up considerable influence in dozens of countries.
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Chapter 2: How does China's Belt and Road Initiative compare to U.S. foreign policy?
If you're a government that quickly wants to build something and maybe wants to show results to its citizens before the next election, somebody who maybe has fewer resources hoops to jump through is going to be an attractive partner.
China's laxer lending standards, paired with its preference for striking deals directly with heads of state, made it that much easier to hand political wins to its partners, like when it completed that Kenyan railway I mentioned before the break just days before a key election. And Gabrielle told me you can actually size up the attractiveness of what China's offering by looking at family photos.
I mean, the family photo, as they're called, you know, those pictures of all the leaders sort of like standing together and getting their photo taken.
The photo, Gabrielle says, is so telling, shows the number of African leaders who've shown up to a summit called the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation over the years. Back in 2012, just 10 stood shoulder to shoulder with then-Chinese President Hu Jintao, whereas last September in Beijing, it was 53.
I was impressed. I mean, everybody was there. People who don't travel, people that we rarely see. And it was a bigger showing than the Americans had at Biden's US-Africa summit at the end of 2022.
In that way, China succeeded in achieving that second goal of the Belt and Road by becoming a partner other countries want to work with. That hasn't gone unnoticed.
In the first Trump administration, as an initial wave of Belt and Road projects were announced, broke ground and turned heads, American officials and lawmakers like then-Senator and now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to persuade countries not to partner with China.
They'd come in, you know, with the promise of a big investment. And for a lot of these countries who have no other way of accessing the capital for these improvements, it sounds like a really good deal. Ultimately, they wind up in a debt trap
In that scenario, often called a debt trap, China would offer loans to countries that it knows can't pay them back. And when they can't, China would seize collateral, maybe even land or strategic assets like ports, or make countries reliant on it in other ways. But Kevin Gallagher at BU says that if that was China's goal, it would have happened by now.
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