China’s Global Development Initiative is not as innocent as it sounds

It is nearly nine years since China’s president, Xi Jinping, began to unveil his first plan for global development. It was revealed in stages, in vague language that conveyed little of what was eventually to become a splurge of infrastructure-building across the world costing hundreds of billions of dollars. Poor countries were delighted; the West grew unnerved. But the Belt and Road Initiative (bri) has hit a few potholes. Covid-19 has taken a toll on debt-laden borrowers. Credit from China has shrunk. So Mr Xi has hatched a new idea. He calls it the Global Development Initiative (gdi), involving less concrete and more greenery. The West will still be wary.

China’s promotion of the gdi suggests how much more confident it has become on the world stage since the bri’s low-key birth, less than a year into Mr Xi’s rule. Unlike the bri, which was pieced together from speeches given by Mr Xi in Asian capitals late in 2013 and took months even to acquire a simple name, the gdi was declared with fanfare—labelled from the start as an initiative with a capital “I”. It was announced by Mr Xi in September in a video address to the un General Assembly. He billed it as a response to the “severe shocks” caused by the pandemic. State media hailed the idea as China’s “golden prescription for global challenges”.