House Panel Raises Alarm Over China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Paramilitary police stand guard on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on March 10, 2021. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) raised warnings on May 16 that the Chinese regime is using its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to force developing nations into debt, then leverage its financial influence over them.

At a hearing titled “All Roads Lead to Beijing? The CCP’s Global Development Offensive,” committee members heard from David Trulio, president and CEO of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute; Daniel Runde, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); and Brad Parks, executive director of AidData at William and Mary’s Global Research Institute.

Mr. Trulio testified during the hearing that the BRI has established a presence in more than 100 countries around the world.

“I don’t think any of us want to live in a world dominated by the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Trulio told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times, on the sidelines of the hearing. “So to the extent that BRI contributes to more Chinese influence, and coercive pressure against countries around the world, that’s not a good thing.”

The Reagan Foundation president contended that where BRI’s influence grows, human rights falter.

“With deeper integration to the [People’s Republic of China] through the Belt and Road Initiative, that actually constrains those countries’ ability to behave in a way that advances human rights, because China has coercive pressure on them,” Mr. Trulio said.

Mr. Trulio said the economic development that BRI projects bring can bolster support for regimes with poor human rights records.

The Reagan Foundation president said the infrastructure projects the CCP is able to establish around the world could serve ulterior motives.

“The concern has to do with dual use, or even as we heard, triple use,” Mr. Trulio said. “So a commercial port could have, potentially, intelligence collection implications, or it could have, potentially in a conflict, military uses.”

‘The CCP Is Not Acting as a Creditor in Good Faith’: Auchincloss

Driving fears that the CCP is using global development projects to gain influence over developing countries is the concern that these development projects trap host countries in projects they cannot easily afford.

“The Chinese Communist Party has been loaning out more than a trillion dollars, and those loans are coming due, and the countries that owe them can’t pay them,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) told NTD News following the hearing.

Mr. Auchincloss said some countries hosting BRI projects have poor liquidity to service debts incurred with these development projects, and others are “downright insolvent.” He said not every BRI recipient country struggles to handle these debts but many do.

“The CCP is not acting as a creditor in good faith,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “They are turning those loans into forms of subservience by these countries and are extracting political concessions in lieu of economic ones.”

Committee Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) said the CCP’s strategy with BRI is a far cry from how the United States handles its own foreign economic development projects.

“When we do economic development, or try and partner with countries, we try and build relationships that are lasting partnerships and trading relationships,” Mr. Moolenaar said. “When China does it, it’s really an exploitation, and something that they will leverage every way possible to advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party.”

China Calls BRI ‘Debt Trap’ Accusations Overhyped

Chinese regime officials have disputed characterizations that the BRI is a “debt-trap” program intended to subvert developing nations. The Chinese Foreign Ministry called such characterizations “malicious” and hyped-up in a January 2022 statement as then-Foreign Minister Wang Yi paid a visit to the Nigerian capital city of Lagos.

Chatham House, a London-based think tank, offered a slightly different defense of BRI in a 2020 assessment—that the Chinese foreign development initiative appears to lack the level of coordination needed to advance major CCP strategic objectives.

“The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is frequently portrayed as a geopolitical strategy that ensnares countries in unsustainable debt and allows China undue influence,” the Chatham House report reads. “However, the available evidence challenges this position: economic factors are the primary driver of current BRI projects; China’s development financing system is too fragmented and poorly coordinated to pursue detailed strategic objectives; and developing-country governments and their associated political and economic interests determine the nature of BRI projects on their territory.”

Mr. Parks offered some similar sentiments in his May 16 testimony before the House.

“There are valid criticisms of China’s overseas lending practices, but ‘debt trap diplomacy’ is not one of them,” Mr. Parks said in his prepared statement. “There is simply no evidentiary foundation for the claim that Beijing is plying foreign governments with oversized loans to push them into default and take control of their seaports, airports, and electricity grids.”

US Should Offer ‘Competing Terms’ to Counter CCP: Krishnamoorthi

During the May 16 hearing, Mr. Runde testified that the U.S. government should look for ways to compete against the BRI, rather than simply call for developing nations to eschew ties with the Chinese regime.

“My main message is this: In this era of great power competition, the United States needs an alternative solution, rather than demand that developing countries cease working with the CCP,” the CSIS executive said. “We can’t fight something with nothing.”

Mr. Parks argued that the Chinese regime has overhauled the BRI significantly in recent years, including by implementing measures to address reputational risks in countries with “BRI buyer’s remorse.”

“China itself has proven that it is capable of making course corrections to address the grievances of BRI participants and the reservations of potential BRI participants,” he said. “As such, the [U.S. government] needs to constitute a rapid response capability if it wants to ensure that it can identify and respond to address the unmet needs of partner countries with alacrity.”

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the ranking member on the House Select Committee on the CCP, echoed some of those sentiments in his own comments to NTD following the hearing.

“We should be offering competing terms, we should be getting into this because it’s very important that the Chinese not, for instance, develop deepwater ports that then they militarize that harm our national security,” he said. “In addition to that, obviously building our soft power muscles is a good thing, too.”

Mr. Auchincloss said that the United States has capabilities on the global economic development front but that “we’ve got to cut through our own red tape and get this stuff done at volume and velocity so that we can really compete.”

From NTD News