China is quickly growing into the world’s most extensive commercial empire. By way of comparison, after World War II, the Marshall Plan provided the equivalent of $800 billion in reconstruction funds to Europe (if calculated as a percentage of today’s GDP). In the decades after the war the United States was also the world’s largest trading nation, and its largest bilateral lender to others.
As Singapore is the chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next year, how Beijing manages its ties with the city state will be crucial to the relationship between China and the Southeast Asian nations – some of which have their own claims to the South China Sea.
China is engaging in a nearly trillion dollar play for the future of Afro-Eurasia—called the Belt and Road Initiative—and has so far caught the United States flat-footed. Unless the United States works with key allies and partners to craft a forward-leaning response, it risks replicating the strategic failure that occurred in the South China Sea. The result could be a China-centric economic and security order extending across Eurasia and along the Indian Ocean rim.
Once dependent on Beijing during the years of international isolation imposed by the West for its nuclear program, Iran is now critical to China’s ability to realize its grandiose ambitions. Other routes to Western markets are longer and lead through Russia, potentially a competitor of China.
When Li Keqiang, China’s premier, took 16 European leaders on a high-speed train ride in 2015, the trip revealed more than an enthusiasm for rolling stock. It was also Beijing’s big sell for an engineering technology that it hoped would spearhead the launch of a grand geo-strategic ambition.
China wants resources to support its growing population, and the Arctic, with its untapped resources, offers those opportunities to mine natural resources. China’s lack of geographical presence in the Arctic has not stopped it laying out its 2017 launch of its Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project encompassing 60 countries and designed to boost the global economy and link China with the world, via sea, land and rail.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the G20 Summit, in Hangzhou, China in 2016. Photo: Press Information Bureau
As China continues to travel toward its goal of becoming the second superpower, it sees India as a challenger that should not be ignored for at least two reasons. First, India has managed to develop close strategic ties with the United States through the purchase of military weapons, the planning of joint military exercises, and the transfer of technology. India also aspires to become a member of the Nuclear Supply Group, after which it would likely become a serious competitor of China in the area of nuclear weapons development.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a group photograph of the SCO Member States at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit, in Astana, Kazakhstan on June 09, 2017.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling for closer cooperation between the two countries. Faced with profound and complex changes of the international situation, China and India, as the world’s two largest developing countries, should pay more attention to cooperation and go ahead with each other as partners, so as to instil more momentum into each other’s development and contribute to world peace, stability and common development, said the Chinese president.
The VIP list at Beijing’s glittering launch party for its massive Silk Road trade plan was worth scrutinising not for the luminaries who were on it, but those who weren’t. Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who irritates Beijing by standing up to its bullying in the South China Sea, was notably missing; he didn’t get an invitation. European government heads were welcome, but mostly stayed away, as did leaders from India and Japan. The no-shows reflect a broad disquiet: To skeptics, what President Xi Jinping calls the “Project of the Century” is, at heart, an imperial venture.
What does China’s President Xi Jinping want? Four years before Donald Trump became president, Xi became the leader of China and announced an epic vision to, in effect, “make China great again”—calling for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
