Opinion | What’s next for the belt and road plan? China must start thinking small and high-quality

What should we expect to see at the second Belt and Road Forum this week? This time, I believe, the Chinese leadership will shift its focus from simply expanding the quantity and scale of the “Belt and Road Initiative” to improving its quality. Put differently, the task at hand is to transform the initiative from a grand but inchoate vision into an actual investment plan.

The belt and road plan was initially conceived as an ambitious, transcontinental effort to expand trade routes between China and some 65 other countries. According to this vision, not only would the strategy diversify China’s trade partners and allow it to export excess capacity, it would also raise the country’s international standing. But far from shoring up soft power in the past six years, the plan has faced a global backlash. Countries have banded together to resist the initiative, such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, where rail projects have stalled. The meme of “debt trap diplomacy”, first coined by an Indian geostrategist, has now stuck.

This ongoing backlash is forcing China to rethink and reset the initiative. Chinese leaders recognise the plan has run into many unexpected problems overseas, including mounting debt risks, white-elephant projects, corruption and various other social and political problems that have stirred public anger in host countries.

A major driver of these problems is the lack of quality control and brand management on China’s part. Despite being a trillion-dollar, top-priority policy, the Belt and Road Initiative is surprisingly ill-defined. It appears any company or project is free to claim membership of it, which means that when anything goes wrong, the whole programme gets blamed. Guidance from Beijing on where investments should be made and what rules they should follow is also conspicuously lacking.