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Does China’s Belt and Road Initiative Challenge the Liberal, Rules-Based Order?

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Abstract

Rising powers like China are frequently depicted as posing a significant challenge to prevailing, Western-designed norms of global governance. Unsurprisingly, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been described as an assertive grand strategy bent on reconstituting regional or even global order with new governance ideas, norms and rules. Conversely, this paper argues that BRI’s challenge to existing global norms will mostly be unintentional. Through an analysis of key policy documents, it demonstrates that the BRI’s normative content is pro-market and pluralist, failing to attack or present anything like a systematic alternative to the existing liberal order. Nonetheless, aspects of BRI’s implementation will challenge prevailing global governance norms, particularly those relating to investment, aid, and social and environmental protection—but mostly by accident, not design. This is due to the fragmented governance of BRI inside China. Accordingly, BRI will likely erode established norms without offering any coherent alternative.

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Notes

  1. One rare exception is the International Academy for the Belt and Road’s suggestion that China develop a new dispute settlement mechanism to govern investment disputes, incorporating “Eastern” processes of “conciliation” – though this would then be followed by standard UN arbitration processes (see Wang 2017).

  2. Tianxia, usually translated as “all under heaven”, refers to the concentric circles of imperial Chinese suzerainty: the core directly under the court, a middle circle of tributary states, and the outer fringe of “barbarians”. At the aforementioned August 2018 symposium, Xi stated that BRI “is in keeping with the Chinese people’s caring for distant peoples, and the tianxia concept” (Trivium China 2018). At the very least this suggests a lack of sensitivity to the way this notion is perceived by the now-sovereign peoples once subject to tianxia. Sidaway and Woon (2017) note a similar insensitivity in some of the Chinese-language literature, which recapitulates (presumably unintentionally) themes from nineteenth-century European imperialism.

  3. China has also created the US$40bn Silk Road Fund, an investment vehicle for state financial institutions, not a multilateral institution, and the New Development Bank (aka the BRICs bank), which – while potentially involved in BRI projects – was not designed to implement the BRI.

  4. Despite the notional defence of diversity and pluralism, the reality is that there are limits to whom China will cooperate with. The adoption of a “one China policy” favouring Beijing is usually the precondition for serious engagement, and there is increasing evidence that displeasing Beijing on important issues can sometimes lead to a form of economic “sanctions” (Reuters 2018).

  5. In reality, Beijing’s development financing is overwhelmingly directed at assisting Chinese enterprises to win markets and contracts in recipient countries, lacking strategic direction and even basic coordination (Bräutigam 2011; Hameiri 2015).

  6. The following draws on Hameiri and Jones (2018, 575–579, 586–587).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Zhou Yuping, Yang Kejia and especially Ryan Smith for excellent research assistance, and to Shahar Hameiri, participants in the Fudan conference on The Normative Basis of Global Governance, particularly Tim Dunne, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Lin Xi.

Funding

Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP1701102647 financed the research underpinning this article.

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    Lee Jones

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Jones, L. Does China’s Belt and Road Initiative Challenge the Liberal, Rules-Based Order?. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 13, 113–133 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-019-00252-8

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