President Xi Jinping's expansionist ambitions consecrate China's domination of Asia until
Africa . Before the West?
He emerges with a determined step, leader of the pack of world diplomacy. A good meter behind, Vladimir
Putin jostles with Eurosceptic Viktor Orban , Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte,
Pakistani Imran Khan or the Filipino troublemaker Rodrigo Duterte. Christine Lagarde , Alexis Tsipras or even
the secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres, closes the march of the stooges of the undisputed star of the
day. Xi Jinping is a magician. This April 25, in a pharaonic hall in the suburbs of Beijing, the
Chinese president has just gathered at his feet 30% of the planet 's GDP and two thirds of its population, at
the occasion of the 2nd forum of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the Belt and Road project, what we
call the new Silk Roads . During his speech-river broadcast on a giant screen, the leader
most authoritarian Chinese since Mao promises new "transparent" paths, "zero tolerance for
corruption” and “green” infrastructure.
A few hours after this triumphant rout organized at the foot of the Great Wall, the close guard of the
Chinese number one returns to American negotiator Bob Lighthizer a confidential document of nearly 150
pages covered with erasures: this is the amended version of an agreement burying the hatchet between the
two leading economies in the world. Beijing goes back on its commitments, refusing to set in stone
any concession to open up its market to foreign competition and to reduce the leading role of
the state in the economy. In the Oval Office, Donald Trump fumes and unsheathes a murderous tweet: the
protectionist president abruptly breaks off talks to announce steep tariff hike
US customs duties by 10 to 25% against 250 billion dollars of Chinese exports, sowing the
panic in the financial markets.
New cold war. At the heart of chancelleries and circles of power in Beijing, this sequence
of events does not deceive anyone. The success of the BRI Forum – over 5,000 registered participants and 67
billions of dollars in contracts announced – reinvigorated the confidence of “Uncle Xi”, jostled at the start of
the year by Trump 's tariff offensive and the slowdown in Chinese growth. The initiative constitutes
a shield to ward off the battering of the American president on the eve of a new cold war which
is announced with the first world power. The participation of leaders from around the world, including
of the European Union, which nevertheless officially criticizes the project, gives a boost to its vision
strategic. “He is reassured, because the BRI has allowed him to forge enough links to prevent a
isolation in the event of a conflict with the United States", analyzes a diplomat.
For centuries, the Middle Kingdom has lived in fear of encirclement, and its mandarins have been toiling
methodically divide the "barbarians" to prevent any common front. Faced with the supporter of "L'Amérique
first”, which attacks all over the place, the Chinese strategists can see coming. To defy the boss
protectionist, Emperor Xi counter-attacks, riding the myth of Marco Polo, serining the little
music of the “gentle commerce” dear to Montesquieu, but with a lot of cranes and hammers
biters. "The new Silk Roads are the signature project of his reign", analyzes Jean-Pierre
Cabestan, professor at Hong Kong Baptist University . Rail, the great leap forward. A train
container ship of several hundred meters leaves the city of Zhengzhou (Henan province, in the
central China) to Europe .
Emerging peripheries. Yellow cranes hover silently above the ocher Kazakh steppe and
rocky. Under a clear blue sky, the huge mechanical grippers grip the containers like
Legos to move them from a train convoy coming from Shanghai to another leaving for Moscow. A
an essential operation due to the different gauge of the Russian and Chinese tracks. "This is where East and West meet," says Franco-Moroccan Hicham Belmaachi, former transport giant
maritime CMA-CGM and owner of the "dry" port of Khorgos, straddling Kazakhstan and China, right in the
boom thanks to Xi 's initiative. On the horizon, towers have emerged from the desert and a gigantic border post
motorway, named Horgos, can now accommodate 2,500 trucks per day. The farthest place from
oceans, in the heart of Eurasia, formerly only frequented by herds of goats, dreams of
new center of the world. Both logistics giants and manufacturers are beginning to bet on this new
Asia-Europe domestic route, a faster alternative to the sea route, which takes more than a month to connect
Shanghai to Rotterdam. Here, in barely two weeks, HP computers produced in Sichuan can
reach Antwerp or Hamburg in refrigerated wagons. Provided, however, that the switches or
paperwork at multiple border posts does not slow down the caravan. If this road is more
expensive than the sea route, it is on the other hand subsidized in a voluntarist way by Beijing as
by Astana, who wants to ride Xi 's vision. “Building infrastructure is the prerequisite for
economic development", adds Hicham Belmaachi.
The world's second largest economy intends to conquer the planet through its emerging peripheries by
satisfying their crying needs for highways, airports, train stations and telecommunications networks . "
China wants to assert itself as a leader of developing countries by focusing on their needs
infrastructure", sums up Mathieu Duchâtel, director of the Asia program at Institut Montaigne. From here to
2030, the Asian continent alone should invest a whopping $ 26 trillion in infrastructure
to continue its ascent, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) calculated in 2017. And Beijing
is also eyeing the colossal demand from Africa .
The new Silk Roads are not just a speech, but a ringing and stumbling reality: according to
the Center for Foreign Relations, an American think tank , China has so far invested in it at least
200 billion dollars . Arm wrestling . Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan on
June 29. The American and Chinese presidents are the best enemies in the world...
Head west . Xi Jinping has already converted the try. Gone are the days of the sneers, when he threw for the
first time his titanic project during a founding speech, in September 2013 in Noursultan
(ex-Astana), Kazakh capital in the heart of the steppe. At the time, his nostalgic references to the explorer
Moroccan Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo had made the chancelleries smile. “History is our best
guide. The glory of the ancient Silk Roads shows that no geographical distance is
insurmountable, continued, lyrically, Uncle Xi. If we bravely take a first step towards each other,
we can walk a path leading to friendship, shared development, harmony and a
better future. » By launching an assault on the steppes of Central Asia, the jungles of Southeast Asia or the
African deserts, Xi was deliberately part of a long story that resonates in the imagination
popular. From an early age, Chinese schoolchildren read the classic "Journey to the West ",
16th century burlesque novel recounting the zany expedition of a monk and a sage in search of
ancestral manuscripts between India and China.
The success was immediate, consolidating the hold of the Chinese president on a pyramid apparatus, far from the
collective leadership of his predecessor Hu Jintao. Very quickly, the officials stood at attention, frightened by
the implacable anti-corruption campaign led by the "red prince", took up as one man the word
of presidential order, anticipating his wishes. Mao the autarkic had ordered a miserable China to make a
Great Leap Forward; his distant successor charts an ambitious course for the factory of the world, on the horizon
planetary. Across the empire, every project funded by the public or private sector – a bridge, a
highway, a university conference or even a start-up incubator – is decked out with the logo
BIS boilerplate . This sesame becomes essential to snatch public funds. Even the
multinationals or heads of government visiting China stuff their speeches with references to the BRI
to better flatter the world's second-largest economy, eyeing its huge market and investments.
Infrastructure. A gigantic highway, with daring works of art, crosses the Tian mountains
Shan, in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It connects western China to Kazakhstan.
Addicted to cash. The new Silk Roads are the international counterpart of Xi 's "Chinese dream" ,
the slogan he hammered out to conquer the Party in 2012. This son of a fellow traveler of Mao, a partisan
of an uninhibited nationalism, judges that the hour of rebirth has come for China, breaking with
the extreme caution of Deng Xiaoping, who on the contrary called on the country to "bide its time". In 2008, the
financial crash of Wall Street sounded the decline of the West and the end of a century and a half of open humiliations
by British gunboats in the First Opium War (1839-1842). A short parenthesis
on the scale of the "five thousand years of Chinese civilization" of which the Party prides itself on being the heir, but bitter.
Throwing once again mandarins, merchants and engineers on the dusty roads of
open spaces, the new helmsman affirms the recovery of a nation that dreams of finding its place,
that of the center of the world.
The project, flexible enough, becomes the new catalyst of red capitalism, offering outlets
to large state construction groups as well as to entrepreneurs seeking new frontiers in
the hour of the breathlessness of growth. Critics denounce a new leak in front of a model
unsustainable, stuffed with subsidies, producing mountains of debt for the sole benefit of
state enterprises and the glory of the Party. “Reformists hate the BRI, they see it as a loss
money to the detriment of the private sector, the real engine of Chinese growth", judge Richard McGregor,
expert at the Lowy Institute, Sydney.
For many economists, the hidden objective of the BRI is to export – if not absorb them – the “
overcapacities" of a breathless construction sector , while advancing Beijing 's political pawns . The
railway constructions from Laos to Africa , via Thailand and Indonesia, financed
by the public banks, make it possible to offer new contracts to State enterprises and work to
Chinese employed even in the African savannah. “Xi is cut from the Soviet mould, he has a vision
statist of the economy", points out the sinologist David Shambaugh, professor at the University Georgetown, to
Washington. The New Silk Roads extend a cash-hungry model, based on
subsidies and centralization, far from the quality required for the upgrading of the second economy
world, say the skeptics. Chinese engineering. On March 21, inauguration of the Boten tunnel (north of
Laos, on the Chinese border), along the future railway line that will link Kunming (China) to Vientiane
(Laos).
Boomerang effect. Worse, the BRI threatens to pack third world debt once again, puts in
maintains the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Because most of the funds are made up of loans, far from
to be free. “They are on a pace of at least 10 billion dollars of loans per year, which is very
substantial”, calculated the researcher Mathieu Duchâtel. If Beijing turns a blind eye to violations of the rights of
man or democracy, unlike Western lenders, it imposes interest rates
trade which places certain more fragile countries in a situation of dependence. Eight of them, such as the
Laos, Kyrgyzstan or gigantic Pakistan will owe 40% of their debts to China. Thus, Sri
Lanka bowed its back and preferred to cede its port of Hambantota for ninety-nine years , offering
Chinese ships a strategic stopover in the heart of the Indian Ocean in exchange for debt relief.
Scalded, the shrewd Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, champion of the Movement of
non-aligned, forced Beijing to renegotiate the cost of a future railway line by a third
in the peninsula, an agreement concluded by his predecessor.
Pakistan's financial problems are much more serious and reveal the limits of the offensive of the
new Silk Roads . Main beneficiary of Chinese largesse with 62 billion
investment, or 20% of its GDP, Islamabad is today on the verge of bankruptcy and must beg
assistance from international donors. The Sino-Pakistani corridor which aims to link the Middle Kingdom to the port of
Gwadar, on the Indian Ocean, did not give Imran Khan's country the expected economic boost . And
now threatens Beijing with a boomerang effect. “If Pakistan goes into default , Xi risks being
singled out,” judge Richard McGregor, who was a correspondent for the Financial Times in Beijing.
Encirclement. This turbulence is a warning announcing a recalibration of the project, which has also been caught up
by the internal difficulties of China, whose growth is at its lowest for twenty-seven years. "Because
of its aging population and slowing economy, China will soon no longer have the
financial bazooka of the past,” warns Richard McGregor, who predicts: “The ambitions of the BIS are going to be
scaled down and refocused on more modest projects. »
A reality already perceptible in April during the BRI forum, during which Beijing adjusted its discourse in the face of
reviews. “The BRI is not a private club,” Xi swore, hitting back at Washington and Brussels. For
appease skeptical governments, the world's second-largest economy offers guarantees of
transparency on calls for tenders and the environmental sustainability of projects. "They stage
listening, but the changes are likely to be cosmetic", judges Mathieu Duchâtel.
Growth crisis or age of reason ? Launched in 2013 in the steppes, Xi 's project takes hold today
in the Eurasian landscape, tracing its way through mountains, valleys and networks of
telecommunications and encircling the American western hemisphere. A bet on history to destiny
still uncertain. “The important thing is to look at where the new Silk Roads will be in five years”,
says Richard McGregor. A trifle on the scale of Chinese history , but a near horizon for
Emperor Xi, who may be looking to rule for life. "This is the start of something, no one can
still say where it will take us", assures Hicham Belmaachi, watching the cranes moving above the
dunes of Horgos§