With China having achieved economic and military status in the beginning of the 21st century, the Chinese President Xi Jinping embarked on a route to make the country a global power and in the meanwhile carve a place for himself in history like his predecessors—Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. What started in 2013 as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) gathered a lot of steam with 150 countries signing it. Bertil Lintner focuses in his book on why the BRI had lost steam by 2023 and eventually did not come close to a Mashall Plan.
Lintner is a Swedish journalist, and author of more than 17 books on Asian politics, important of them being China’s India War, Land of Jade, Great Game East. The timing of this book is perfect as the BRI fails to deliver prosperity, rather leading to what has come to be called a ‘debt trap’ initiative that is witnessed in countries such as Sri Lanka, Laos or Pakistan. Moreover, by 2023, China has faced the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis in real estate market, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, slow growth, decline in foreign investment, etc. The BRI initiative that was to usher the 21st century as the Chinese century never materialized, says Lintner.