It has been over 11 years since Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative. Since then, hundreds of billions of dollars have flowed from China to infrastructure projects across the world, leaving some Western observers wary of Beijing’s growing influence and critical of the United States for doing too little to counter it.
From the initiative’s beginning in 2013 until 2021, China had disbursed roughly $679 billion combined to 165 countries to fund infrastructure projects, according to an October report published by the Government Accountability Office. While China’s Belt and Road spending slumped during the COVID-19 pandemic, a recent American Enterprise Institute report found that construction activity associated with the initiative jumped by 40% during the first half of 2024. A dashboard maintained by the AEI shows that China has already spent tens of billions of dollars on projects in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America.
Belt and Road funding comes primarily in the form of government-to-government loans to help developing and developed nations alike fund a variety of infrastructure projects. Energy-related projects have been China’s primary focus with its investment, constituting 35% of Belt and Road spending between 2013 and 2021, according to the GAO. Other major spending areas during that period included $202 billion spent on transportation, $202 billion on industrial projects, $26 billion on communications infrastructure, and about $9 billion on water and sanitation.
In the Chinese government’s own words, the Belt and Road Initiative exists as a means to develop a modern-day “Silk Road,” with China at the center of global commerce.
American policymakers and foreign policy experts have long worried that China’s Belt and Road spending is being used by the Chinese Communist Party to expand its global influence and alienate the U.S. from its allies. Some have accused China of shackling developing nations with debt and using that debt to extract political concessions. Others, meanwhile, fear that embedding CCP loyalist corporations such as Huawei in the infrastructure of other countries will increase global dependency on China and undercut America’s economic influence. Concerns have also been floated that the Belt and Road Initiative has given China access to strategic locations and resources.
The U.S. government is not blind to China’s global influence spending. In 2018, Congress established the International Development Finance Corporation with the aim of countering China’s infrastructure diplomacy. The DFC differs from the Belt and Road Initiative in that it provides loans, direct investments, loan guarantees, and risk insurance to private development projects. The Belt and Road Initiative, meanwhile, operates primarily through the Chinese government providing other governments with infrastructure loans.
Though DFC lending has more than doubled since 2020, the GAO, the official watchdog organization of the federal government, still warns that China is outpacing the U.S. in development spending abroad.
While some estimates place China’s foreign infrastructure spending at over $1 trillion, the combined forces of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Commerce Department, Export-Import Bank, State Department, DFC, Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency only spent about $76 billion on foreign infrastructure projects between 2013 and 2021.
In response to the GAO’s findings, DFC officials said they “adhere to high standards for labor and the environment, are responsive to local needs, and improve a market’s overall competitiveness … without increasing a nation’s sovereign debt.” The GAO identified the higher standards required by Western sources as one factor pushing many developing countries toward China.
Civil society representatives interviewed by the GAO said China’s infrastructure investments provide it with “greater political and diplomatic influence in their country.”
The Belt and Road Initiative is also expanding its geographic footprint, adding several new members, some of whom have close relations with the U.S., between 2021 and 2023. Argentina, Botswana, Afghanistan, Syria, Jordan, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic were among the new additions to China’s global infrastructure network.
There have, however, been some recent high-profile defections from the Belt and Road Initiative. In December 2023, for instance, Italy announced that it would be withdrawing from the infrastructure program. Argentina, which signed a Belt and Road cooperation agreement with China in June 2023, has also moved to distance itself from the CCP. Argentine President Javier Milei campaigned on not making “pacts with communists” and has since refused an invitation to join BRICS, a China-dominated organization representing non-Western countries. Argentina and China, however, still have strongly interconnected economies.
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Not everyone in the West opposes China’s global development program. The Ford Foundation, one of the largest private charities in the world, has pumped roughly $10 million into supporting China’s strategy of funding foreign infrastructure projects to accumulate influence. A spokesperson for the charity explained that it hopes to help make China’s impact on the world “equitable” and “sustainable.”
“The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t primarily use development loans to develop Global South economies,” Michael Sobolik, American Foreign Policy Council senior fellow and author of Countering China’s Great Game, previously told the Washington Examiner. “It leverages them to export authoritarianism and create economic dependency on Beijing. American foundations shouldn’t be furthering those malign objectives.”
