China's Great Belt and Road Economic Initiative

hello everybody welcome back to another brand new episode of megaprojects a few weeks ago we did a video all about the pakistan economic corridor and a lot of the comments were like simon why don't you tackle the wider china belt and road initiative and well here i am delivering and also if you'd like to get something delivered to you why not check out the merch for mega projects at the merch store which is linked to below we get a whole bunch of blueprinted stuff like this a12 um i'm always sitting down so it's not awesome on display but if you check out the link below you'll see all of the finest merch and let's get into it it's one of the most ambitious far-reaching and costly projects that the world has ever seen china's belt and road initiative doesn't compare with anything else because quite simply it stands alone and nothing like it has ever been attempted before the chinese government calls it a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future others see it as the fast track to world domination by a burgeoning chinese superpower we're going to try and stay unbiased and let you decide firstly the belt and road initiative is so vast and incorporates so many countries that it would be impossible to cover everything in a single video but we're going to try and cram in as much as we possibly can so put on your seat belt so i'm going to have to wear a seat belt if i don't want to freedom [Music] in layman's turns the china belt and road initiative is a series of global networks focusing on primarily trade which all originates or ends in china it incorporates roads railway lines shopping routes ports and well much much more like i say we gotta try and keep this video relatively manageable the estimated cost of the entire project is thought to be in the region of wait for it a trillion dollars to put that figure into perspective only 16 countries around the world have a gdp above their figure the project was first announced in 2013 with a targeted completion date of 2049 which will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the people's republic of china so nobody can accuse the chinese government of not planning for the future indeed i would say that's the one thing that the chinese government does incredibly well because they don't have to worry about the election in four years time they can just plan forever but you probably won't be surprised to hear that the initiative has come in for plenty of criticism debt repayments land leases and financial irregularities are just a few of the charges that have been leveled against the project however we need to look at this for what it could be a dramatic power shift much of the criticism of the belt and road initiative has come from countries that primarily control global trade it's therefore hardly surprising that some might balk at the idea of that power being taken away [Music] chinese president xi jinping first unveiled plans for the initiative during visits to kazakhstan and indonesia in september and october 2013. it was promoted by chinese dignitaries over the next few years throughout asia and europe and by 2016 the project was being widely reported by both the chinese and foreign media the benefits that were often pushed were of integration and unifying global markets a way of allowing trade to flow freely and easily around the world as well as cultural exchanges that would benefit all countries who were involved in the initiative the chinese government saw the initiative as addressing the so-called infrastructure gap to put it plainly poorer countries along the route did not have the means to facilitate such a free-flowing system without suitable rail links poor capacity and roads while the belton road initiative would just be impossible if it was to happen while new infrastructure would need to be built and this is where things become just a little bit murkier of course everybody wants brand new sparkling infrastructure but how do you pay for it most of the criticism of the initiative falls on this subject many of the countries included in the project are developing nations understandably eager to join the head table they do not have the means to pay for such infrastructure themselves so have relied on chinese loans this is a subject that we're going to come back to a little later in the video the initiative now includes cooperation signatures from 138 countries 65 of the world's population and 40 of the global gdp as of 2017. but this is really about two separate initiatives when you think about it one of them is over land and one of them is maritime [Music] the name silk road certainly stepped in history what was once an ancient trading route linking the east and the west from as far as china to central europe is being revived but of course with a 21st century twist while the new route doesn't exactly follow the ancient way its starts and end points they're roughly the same the silk road economic belt now incorporates countries which stretch from china to europe but even this can be subdivided into three corridors which are soon expected to account for as much as 40 percent of the world's overland trade the new eurasian land bridge runs from china's xi jiang autonomous region and includes kazakhstan russia belarus poland germany and holland according to chinese media this route connects the chinese city of liangyun gang to rotterdam in holland a distance of 11 870 kilometers a second corridor will travel further south connecting china with mongolia and the russian far east where it could connect with the new eurasian land bridge the china-central asia west asia economic corridor is a railway line that now links western china with turkey and then europe the first freight train completed this route in november 2009 traveling from xi'an to prague in just 18 days passing through kazakhstan azerbaijan georgia and turkey before entering europe [Music] the maritime silk road also has a historic basis the expedition routes of zhang he in the 15th century have become legendary in the maritime silk road is roughly based on some of these journeys this can be divided into four separate routes which essentially join ports across the world these routes accounted for roughly half of the ocean container traffic even before the maritime silk road so they're not exactly blazing a new trail here the china southeast asia route incorporates vietnam myanmar thailand cambodia indonesia the philippines malaysia and singapore the china-south asia route links malaysia pakistan sri lanka india and vietnam then there's the middle east africa route which joins malaysia uae iraq djibouti and sudan a fourth route is set to connect china with europe by way of the suez canal in the mediterranean now as i've just mentioned many of these routes have already been in operation for many years but the maritime silk road aims to speed up the entire process while allowing for significantly more traffic this is being done by expanding deep water ports building logistical hubs while also creating overland traffic routes connecting to other ports or railings much of the plans regarding the maritime silk road are still on the vague side but several ports around the world have been leased by china on a long-term basis this is by no means the complete list but to give you a general idea of lengths obark in djibouti has been leased for 10 years gwadar in pakistan for 40 years while hambantota in sri lanka and malacca gateway and malaysia have been leased for a huge 99 years if you're interested that's the same length of time that the british leased hong kong from the chinese for in 1898. there are far too many projects completed runway around the world for us to mention them all so we're just going to mention an important few egypt has traditionally had a close relationship with china and the country was one of the first to sign up to the initiative between 2015 and 2017 egypt borrowed 1.0 1.03 billion dollars from china for various infrastructure projects including a new industrial zone and the gulf of suez operated by china an electric train system for its new administrative capital and investments for the western sahara region in 2018 a chinese consortium won the right to build a six thousand megawatt coal-fired electricity generating plant in humber rain on the red sea at a cost of 4.4 billion dollars however due to the covet-19 pandemic this project has been shelved kenya received loans to build its mombasa to nairobi standard gauge railway at a cost of 3.3 billion making it the largest project since the country gained independence while the railway has generally been seen as a success in 2019 china pulled its funding of the project with the line still 75 miles from nairobi many believed that this was because of a rising sentiment that china was loading poorer countries with unsustainable debt something that we're about to come to azerbaijan will play a key role in the belton road initiative with its most notable infrastructure improvements being the baku tablissi cars railway and the baku international sea trade port these can currently handle 15 million tonnes of cargo a year but with further improvements that number's soon gonna rise to 25 million tons under former leader najib razak malaysia signed numerous deals with china including the 27 billion east coast railing project pipelines projects totaling more than 3.1 billion dollars as well as a 100 billion dollar forest city in johor however these deals have since been linked to the one mdb scandal in which najib razak was implicated in funneling 700 million dollars to his personal bank accounts both the rail link and the pipelines have since been cancelled by the new prime minister mahathir mohammed kazakhstan kyrgyzstan tajikistan tech menasthan and uzbekistan will all play an important role in the land routes from the east to the west and could also handsomely benefit from the transit fees at least 261 separate projects are included in the belton road initiative throughout these five countries in tajikistan roads railways pipelines power plants and even plans for traffic cameras have been included turkmenistan a traditionally closed country is beginning to open up and its projects include the turkmenistan and china gas pipeline the international north-south transportation corridor providing a rail link between russia kazakhstan turkmenistan and iran the lapis lazuli international transit corridor a rail connection with afghanistan turkmenistan azerbaijan georgia and turkey and the turkmenistan afghanistan pakistan india tapi pipeline project the amount of projects that are underway in pakistan is simply astonishing i'm not going to bore you with it all here because we've already done a megaprojects video all about the china-pakistan economic corridor that i mentioned at the beginning of this video if you want to really dive into all of that please do go check out that video after you've seen this one because i need all that watch time so how much has been spent so far well this is another grey area it was estimated that by 2017 around 210 billion dollars had been invested by china in the project the majority in asia but this doesn't really tell the whole story chinese companies have been awarded over 340 billion dollars worth of contracts along the belton road initiative whether to build railways roads logistical hubs or to expand ports the very obvious problem that comes with chinese companies often bringing with them chinese workers dominating projects along the routes is that it comes at a significant cost to local contractors this has led some to question whether the entire initiative isn't really about trade but rather is a way of boosting china's slowing economy the country has set itself enormous growth targets ever since the 1980s but the last 10 years of simmer slowdown another complicated and hugely controversial aspect of the belt and road initiative is debt repayment now it must be said that most of the loans that have been given out by the chinese government have not been fully disclosed in terms of conditions attached while we often have a rough idea of the numbers we don't know the ramifications should countries fail to repay their debts in maldives loans have been provided for 20 different projects the three largest of which are thought to account for nearly 40 percent of the entire country's gdp in bangladesh a country with a gdp of 274 billion dollars chinese loans are believed to amount to 35 billion if there was any doubt about the kind of leverage china holds over these developing countries you need to only look at sri lanka and tajikistan if you remember the port in sri lanka with the astonishingly long lease well this in part came about because the sri lankan government was struggling to meet its repayment requirements and the story of what has been built is far from pretty either matala rash paxar international airport was built with the aid of chinese loans and is designed to handle a million passengers per year but typically it handles only around fifty 000 and some days only one flight arrives or departs in 2011 tajikistan ceded 1158 square kilometers of disputed territory to china in exchange for an undisclosed amount of debt relief and the list goes on djibouti kyrgyzstan lao the maldives mongolia montenegro and pakistan are all believed to be in danger of falling into the so-called debt trap and owe over half of their foreign debt to china now i'll be careful with how i conclude the video today so far there has been next to no indication that china has done anything explicitly wrong with these kinds of loans these governments know what they're getting their countries into however when you take into account corruption the prospect of a country being saddled with 30 years worth of debt because of one administration is pretty difficult for many to take so what can we really say after all of that is this the grand plan of mutual trade and understanding around the world that the chinese government has professed or is it a way of leveraging political power while also stimulating growth back in china reality is it's almost certainly a little bit of both the western world has reacted negatively at what is happening and the way china is expanding its influence but the truth is the first world countries have kept poorer nations under the thumb for hundreds if not thousands of years china isn't twisting arms to make countries take unsustainable debts but humans have this terrible habit of spending beyond their means the growing number of projects which have been built and have either failed or not lived up to their promise is quickly growing but often this really has little to do with china instead the administrations within these countries must shoulder some of the blame one thing that is often said about the belton road initiative is that china asks far fewer questions about loans than other sources for example after the arab spring uprising of 2011 egypt struggled to secure loans from organizations around the world understandably wary of the insecurity in the country however china didn't share the same concerns or if they did it wasn't a big problem for them we won't get a clear idea about the success or the failure of the belt and road initiative for many many years if we forget about all the geopolitical ramifications and the debt problems the initiative will certainly speed up connections around the world while also allowing developing nations to improve both their infrastructure and their countries as a whole it's important to separate anti-china sentiment here western nations have saddled poorer countries with debt for decades now so what is happening with the initiative is certainly nothing new the question of how successful countries will be will often depend on the administrations in charge done the right way these countries could see significant growth done the wrong way and they'll be caught in a never-ending debt cycle these vast trading routes emanating from china can blaze a whole new era of global networking and potentially make a huge difference to countries on every continent this is a project so enormous that it's almost difficult to comprehend and may end up being the largest mega project in all of history doubts and fears will always remain along with our terrible overspending habits we also fear change but it's easy to fear change when we look down from our ivory towers if the belton road initiative reaches its projected conclusion the world may well be forever altered with a serious rebalancing of power on the cards as far as the positives and negatives of this go well we'll let you decide and so i really hope you enjoyed that video if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe if you've got suggestions for future videos on mega projects let me know in the comments below because well that's where i often find the topics that we cover here or also if you'd like to uh purchase the merch you can do that please find a link below and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 306,064

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Id: AsVEKxI02d0

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020