by Fong Yuen

After Xi Jinping took power, the One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR) became the major show from the CCP to the world. Its objective is as a strategy for the CCP to expand outward.

Since its rapid economic growth, the CCP has accumulated a large amount of wealth. Money can make one arrogant. The CCP’s communist ideology expanded again, and its thought of “liberating” mankind reemerged. It has enforced a complete expansion policy to grab the right to speak for the world, lead the world’s situation, and change the world structure.

The CCP has two fronts to expand: one is to target western countries, and the other is developing countries. It uses the free and open society of western countries like the U.S. to implement the all-round united front, using various “effective” tactics to mass infiltrate the political, business, academic, and professional sectors of various countries. It has also built many Confucius Institutes worldwide and secretly smuggled in communist ideology, trying to change the other countries’ political ecology and influence their national policies, which could help the CCP to grasp the strategic initiative.

On the other hand, the CCP exported funds and production capacity to the third world developing countries, on the paper, to help them with the infrastructure. It attracted many small and medium countries to cooperate and used economic construction to tie up politics and military matters. It made these countries burden with huge debt and threatened them to side with the CCP in international matters. This strategy has been given a nice name OBOR, which creates debtors, contracts projects, at the same time, exports excess capacity, and promotes Chinese culture. One stone kills more birds.

OBOR aims at Europe and heads deep into the areas surrounding Russia. If the CCP gets its hands on all the countries along the Silk Road, Europe and Russia will be strategically at threat in the long run. Europe is not vigilant enough to realize the danger, and Russia has its own unspeakable reason not to react. Therefore OBOR was going very well before the U.S.-China relations turned sour.

Having been hyped up by the CCP for so many years, OBOR did really gain reactions from some small and medium countries, of course, with the help of corruption. And the developments of the new areas have caused a lot of environmental damage. The CCP lent money to many countries that cannot afford to pay back such huge debt. Some of these countries ended up having to give their national resources as a pawn or lease out their national sovereign interests long-term.

To these small and poor countries in Central Asia and the Middle East, their economic developments are not established enough to take on such big construction projects. Big projects need big financial input. When the project was completed, the utilization rate and profit were lower than expected, which caused many small and medium countries to fall into the debt trap. Meanwhile, the CCP’s large-scale expansion is also in danger of coming to an abrupt end due to a sudden turn of the international situation.

As the U.S.-China relations deteriorated, the CCP’s expansion has been experiencing setbacks as it has never before. It has to withdraw its infiltration in the western countries, and its economy faces difficulty. At the same time, the debt crisis of the OBOR countries has surfaced. An article named “China pulls back from the world: rethinking Xi’s ‘project of the century’” in the recent Financial Times pointed out, the funding of OBOR, which was roughly seven times what the US spent through the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the second world war, has fallen off a cliff and collapsed from a peak of $75bn to just $4bn last year. FT also commented OBOR was becoming China’s first overseas debt crisis, and the CCP found itself mired in debt renegotiation with a host of countries.

According to the Boston University data, the two Chinese banks lent US$462 billion between 2008 and 2019, just short of what the World Bank extended. The expert commented the fate of OBOR depends on “its ability to renegotiate loans with countries now in urgent need of debt relief. If China is unable or unwilling to provide sufficient relief to its borrowers, it could find itself at the centre of a debt crisis in developing markets.”

That means since most borrower countries cannot afford to repay the money, if the CCP is unwilling or unable to release them, it can only carry the debt itself, which would become its burden and drag them down to the deep end of trouble.

What can be certain is, there is nothing more to go on with OBOR. The remaining problem now is how to end this. The ideal would be to retrieve all the money owed by the debtors then bow out. But this is unrealistic. The small and medium countries can see the CCP cannot expand further and are only too happy to carry on owing them money. The CCP might have to swallow this bitter pill as it has no idea what to do otherwise.

All these troubles because of the CCP’s outward expansion. If only it had focused on managing itself instead of dreaming about “building a community with a shared future for mankind,” the U.S.-China relations would not have been worsened to such an extent, and the loss of OBOR would have been avoided. It seems that the consequences caused by one wrong decision from Xi Jinping would make him filled with regrets for a very long time.

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