China’s New Belt and Road Has Less Concrete, More Blockchain
The U.S. response to it has been “too little, too late,” says a new task force report.
The Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t been good for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The virus “seriously affected” one-fifth of the projects in the China-centered infrastructure drive, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Djibouti, Laos, Maldives, Pakistan, and Zambia, among others, have asked China to renegotiate or forgive Belt and Road loans. Kyrgyzstan and Sri Lanka have already extracted concessions.
But Belt and Road isn’t going away. China is making more rigorous lending decisions while focusing somewhat less on heavy-duty construction and more on digital technology, says a Council on Foreign Relations task force report released on March 23. The 190-page report, titled China’s Belt and Road: Implications for the United States, was written by Jennifer Hillman and David Sacks of the CFR based on the findings of an independent task force chaired by former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and retired Admiral Gary Roughead.