Israel and China’s Silk Road
2017
When China’s president, Xi Jinping, articulated his idea of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) in Astana in September 2013 and again a month later in Jakarta, what emerged was a vision to parlay large-scale economic dynamism into a foreign policy projecting Chinese influence overseas in the name of development. Inclusive and expansive at once, this is an ambitious vision, and one that could seal ours as the Chinese century if it succeeds in weaving the loose ends of China’s overseas interests into a coherent whole.
Three years into SREB, now better known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a part of the vision is slowly taking on flesh. The volume of media reports attests to this. What remains less clear is the strategic implications and opportunities of BRI for China’s partners. Occupying a slight sliver at the intersection of West Asia and the Middle East, Europe and Africa – regions of intimate relevance to BRI – Israel too has joined the new Silk Road caravan. Where does it fit in, and what difference does BRI make?
The Belt and Road Initiative: the idea and the implementation
China’s current fundamental challenge is to preserve the existing form of government under the Chinese Communist Party by maintaining political and social stability. The latter in turn depends on managing economic expectations and growth, which has slowed down to single-digit rates since the 2007-08 subprime mortgage crisis. With BRI, the means to maintaining and rejuvenating economic output lies in exporting excess manufacturing and industrial capacities, especially those linked to China’s many state-owned companies (SOEs). By transiting Xinjiang province – home to China’s 10 million Uyghur Muslims – into Central Asia and farther westwards, these infrastructural projects could also theoretically diminish the development gaps between the affluent coastal economic regions and China’s backward and restive western regions, improving domestic and border stability.
In geostrategic terms, BRI diversifies and secures both overland and maritime routes for exports and the import of energy and raw materials, putting in motion a veritable global Chinese supply chain. China’s most important export markets lie in the EU and the United States, whereas its energy imports originate heavily from the Middle East, as well as Central Asia and Russia.
BRI does not only promise to leverage Chinese wealth in stimulating economic growth via infrastructural development in BRI partner countries at a time when most economies remain sluggish. It does this in an unspoken way aimed at reinforcing China’s political and cultural influence and image as a benign power keen to share the dividends of its inexorable rise. If successful, BRI will have implanted and perhaps even mainstreamed international financial institutions paralleling the existing Bretton Woods institutions, encouraging greater use of local currencies including the Renminbi. Aimed westwards, BRI is also perceived to meet the United States’ own controversial ‘rebalance’ towards the Asia-Pacific, formally announced in 2011, and sidesteps the once-related Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that conspicuously excludes Beijing. Insofar as a trading bloc, China’s BRI would include over 60 countries, 63% of the world’s population, 29% of world GDP, and roughly a quarter of the world’s turnover in goods and services.
This combines a fundamental, incompressible interest (rejuvenating the economy to maintain political stability) with a seemingly maximal one (projecting China’s influence globally), even if China’s historical attempts at engaging the outside world (the original, overland Silk Road initiative during the Han period and naval expeditions as far as east Africa during the Ming dynasty) never accompanied imperial expansionism. Some domestic voices have argued that BRI constitutes grand strategy at China’s best and most subtle, even as others downplay its significance. Perhaps wary of provoking unnecessary suspicion, even Xi’s administration decided to soften BRI from ‘strategy’ to ‘initiative’, inviting reciprocal engagement as it were. If we define grand strategy as an integrative statement of a country’s desired ends and the spectrum of means subordinated to these ends, then BRI might be argued to fit the definition, notwithstanding the lexical corrective.
https://www.openbriefing.org/publications/report-and-articles/israel-chinas-silk-road/