- by A Carruthers
- The Guardian
- Issue #2110
Graphic: Mathildem16 – Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The ancient Silk Road thrived in times of peace, and declined in times of war. Without a peaceful and stable environment, it would be impossible to pursue the Belt and Road Initiative.
― Xi Jinping
No doubt you’ve heard a lot about China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’ in the media. There’s a lot of hype and misinformation. I will limit myself to three points that need emphasising about the BRI and its true aims and methods.
DEBT FORGIVENESS
Perhaps the most important thing to emphasise is that the BRI has committed some of biggest debt forgiveness in world history, all the while the US has been claiming the BRI is a form of “debt-trap diplomacy.”
Widely-cited research by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire, by no means Chinese-affiliated academics, has shown that Chinese banks are “willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country.” They use the example of the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka as an example. In 2022 China announced that it would forgive 23 interest-free loans to 17 African countries, contributing to a staggering 63 per cent of debt service suspensions in the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI). For China, debt forgiveness is commonplace.
While Brautigam and Rithmire show in concrete terms why “debt-trap diplomacy” is not the point of the BRI, they do not examine the deeper issue which is the very nature of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and its international relations philosophy. The reason the BRI is constructive and beneficial is because China has a sincere interest in delivering lasting benefits to the Third World. The BRI idea emerges from the experience of its own success in poverty reduction and elimination.
COMMUNISM AND TRADE
In 1921 Lenin wrote a text called The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism. It was not just related to the problem of the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) and the new turn in the Soviet economy in that historical period, but the larger problem of trade in relation to communism. He writes:
“Communism and trade?! It sounds strange. The two seem to be unconnected, incongruous, poles apart. But if we study it from the point of view of economics, we shall find that the one is no more remote from the other than communism is from small-peasant, patriarchal farming.”
Lenin’s text is about the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism. Lenin shows that communist countries, in other words, do conduct trade and do so while understanding the dialectics of trade as part of the larger dialectic of capitalism and socialism and the overcoming or bypassing of capitalism to forge a path towards communist society.
It’s important to quote Lenin here because it’s important to point out that the BRI, which promotes trade, is not foreign to the activity of communism from the point of view of economics. Although of course it is not designed to force socialism or any particular political system upon any country, the BRI is designed to develop the productive forces of developing countries that desperately need it through trade primarily under state supervision, that is, on a governmental level, on the level of the national economy.
Fundamentally, the BRI enables developing countries to develop and trade outside the dictates of the US-led financial system.
The primary means of advancing the productive forces in Eurasian and African partners to the BRI is in transport (road and rail), electrification, communications connectivity, heavy industry, technology and healthcare. The long-term returns will be positive in terms of trade, both internal and external circulation, and the development of national economies. It is expected that the BRI will lift 32 million people out of poverty by 2030.
However, while raising the productive forces will improve the conditions of workers, it doesn’t guarantee the rule of workers. The emergence of a socialist society is only possible through protracted class struggle under the guidance of a Communist Party or similar workers’ movement that can coordinate production and society simultaneously to produce new social relations – in short, to move beyond capitalism, to transition out of state capitalism into socialism, to build a communist society, to advance to communism rather than retreat to capitalism.
Singapore is an obvious example. While there’s a lot of accelerated development, there is a significant amount of ‘state capitalism.’ While the technological level is high, the Singaporean working class are not getting the benefits that they should be getting from such development. Inequality between classes and ethnic groups remains high. Social cohesion (social relations) remains weak, unequal and undeveloped. Singapore does not intend to advance beyond state capitalism, at least not in the short term.
So while there’s no guarantee that BRI-affiliated governments will turn to socialist methods – producing new social relations and a socialist society – we know that the socialist transition is impossible without raising the level of the productive forces. Western countries have been reluctant to partner with developing countries on infrastructure projects, in countries of the Global South, or countries like Tajikistan, on ideological and political grounds. This leaves developing countries in a difficult position – either submit to the IMF, the US-led financial system, and the Western way of life, or wage economic war through protection in already fragile conditions.
The alternative is the BRI, equal exchange on equal terms, favouring both national ownership and trade simultaneously.
INTER-CIVILISATIONAL DIALOGUE
Commentators have noticed that in recent years, the BRI is no longer limited just simply to infrastructural development, but rather cultural and “inter-civilisational dialogue,” meaning communication between different cultures, different continents and civilisations. We know that in the long human history of trade, the material aspect of exchange has come hand in hand with cultural exchange as well.
This is why it is wrong to claim that the BRI is designed to increase “Chinese influence in the world.” It’s rather the opposite. It emerges from a genuine and deep analysis of the economic and cultural history of trade from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. The Western world, which is actually the biggest global cause of debt distress, was always going to react badly to the BRI. China knew that it would not be able to win the narrative in the West.
Embarking on the BRI in fact delivers a great burden; while it contributes to the build up of economic strength in poorer and developing countries, and is a necessary pathway in the history of communist trade, it inevitably leads to less Western Influence as the West unites more strongly against it, fearing loss of its imperial and hegemonic position in the world. While the West has only thought of trade in terms of war – trade war, economic warfare, cold and hot warfare, political interference and invasion, the suppression of liberation movements and suppression of economic struggle – they never thought of trade in the way China does; as both material and cultural exchange, inter-civilisational dialogue.
This is what Xi Jinping means when he draws a connection between the BRI and peace – the BRI philosophy is the polar opposite to the “clash of civilisations” philosophy of the West. It isn’t about the forcible acquisition of oil through war in the Middle East, or the imperialist destruction of national economies through US-dollar hegemony. It’s a pathway to peace, development and interconnectivity, a world of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation rather than invasion and war.
