3 Years on, Where Does China’s Silk Road Stand?

Three years ago, during a visit to Kazakhstan, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled what has come to be his signature foreign policy initiative: the Silk Road Economic Belt. Speaking on September 7, 2013 at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Xi urged China and Kazakhstan to “work together to build the Silk Road Economic Belt.” In the speech, Xi described a vague vision for renewing the ancient Silk Road in order to “forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation, and expand development space in the Eurasian region.”

Since then, the policy has been both fleshed out and elevated. So much so that some reference to the Silk Road Economic Belt and its overseas counterpart, the Maritime Silk Road, makes its way into statements at every meeting between a Chinese official and his or her Asian or European counterparts.  According to remarks from Xi Jinping at a symposium on the Belt and Road held in Beijing on August 17 of this year, over 100 countries and international organizations have agreed to participate. Of those, 34 have signed formal inter-governmental cooperation agreements with China.

Those agreements have come with a raft of Chinese money. Chinese media report investments of nearly $15 billion by Chinese companies in 49 countries along the Belt and Road route in 2015. From January to April of 2016, Chinese companies added another $4.91 billion in investments. According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, the top recipients of these Belt and Road investments are Singapore, Kazakhstan, Laos, Indonesia, Russia, and Thailand (not necessarily in that order). 

Much more is on the horizon in the form of planned projects. “In 2015, a total of 3,987 contracts for contracted projects in 60 countries along the ‘Belt and Road’ were signed by the Chinese enterprises, with a contract value of $92.64 billion, taking up 44.1 percent of China’s contracted projects overseas,” a Commerce spokesperson said in a press conference in January 2016.

These figures, however, merely track investments in countries along the Belt and Road – not necessarily projects officially highlighted by Beijing as part of OBOR. Such projects tend to be related to infrastructure – railway or highway construction, for example, or gas and oil pipelines – or to what China calls “industrial capacity cooperation,” centered in special economic zones that provide unique incentives to Chinese companies wishing to establish factories abroad. Below, I’ll trace the route of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) from China to Europe, and look at what progress has been made – or pitfalls encountered – over the three years since Xi introduced the concept.