Some critics have accused China of buying political influence and goodwill or even of power-grabbing through the BRI. Others have expressed concern over growing debt levels in the BRI countries, thereby turning those highly indebted countries into Chinese client states, and also of lopsided contracts which favour Chinese contractors. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, for example, opined that in order to make it a win-win strategy, just as Africa opens up to China, China must also open up to Africa.
An important but unpopular point for the Western audience that the author makes is that for a country in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia or South Asia, Chinese offerings these days trump those of the US; as Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen explained it poignantly, “Other countries have lots of ideas, but no money. But for China, when it comes with an idea, it also comes with the money.”
Frankopan is critical of Trump’s trade-war policies towards China and believes that his flawed Iran policy, built on sanctions, is a road to nowhere and will impact Washington’s relations with European Union (EU) capitals in addition to driving Iran closer to China, Russia and the EU. He also discusses the current elections in Pakistan, the importance of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects as flagship projects of the BRI, and Islamabad’s pivot away from Washington and towards Beijing. He is quite sanguine about the emergence of Gwadar potentially as a major gateway and ponders if it can one day become the new Shanghai.
The pace of globalisation, with its changing influences and ownership structures, has also been explored at length in the book. A number of states along the Silk Road were subjected to colonisation by the British and other European countries. Art, manuscripts and sculptures were carted away to be displayed as trophies in European capitals. Now the trend has reversed, as the affluent and the well-heeled from countries along the Silk Road have been hunting for football club ownerships in Britain and Europe as trophies to be displayed.
The trend is not just restricted to football clubs, but to well-known and prestigious European brands as well, from Volvo to Harrods, and from the Odeon to the Waldorf. They are being snapped up with outright ownership or as partnerships by the wealthy elite in the East.
Frankopan has also captured the ironies of globalisation in his absorbing book: Osama Bin Laden has been held responsible for 9/11 and bringing down the World Trade Centre twin towers. The Carrara marble quarries in Italy have supplied the marble used in the construction of the Freedom Tower, built at the site of the twin towers in New York; Bin Laden’s family is the principal shareholder in the firm that owns the Carrara marble quarries.
“A new world is emerging in Asia, and it is not a free one,” Frankopan warns quite ominously. There is little concern for political plurality and human rights in this Asian economic resurgence, led by China. A number of countries in the region are characterised by extractive and non-inclusive political and/or economic institutions. In their influential book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, noted political economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson posited that countries with non-inclusive and extractive institutions can grow for a while, but this growth is not sustainable.
They argued that even the erstwhile Soviet Union, under extractive and non-inclusive institutions, grew spectacularly from 1928 to 1960 but then ran out of steam, resulting in initial slowdown and then total collapse. After economic reforms, China’s economic institutions are more inclusive compared to the Soviet Union, but both authors questioned the sustainability of breathtaking Chinese economic growth in the presence of its non-inclusive and extractive political institutions. With the changing economic landscape emerging across the globe, this theory will be tested in China and some other Silk Road countries in the next few decades.
The New Silk Roads:
The Present and
Future of the World
By Peter Frankopan
Bloomsbury, UK
ISBN: 978-1526607423
336pp.
The reviewer is an independent researcher based in Islamabad
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 23rd, 2019