Chinese officials are often hard-pressed to explain exactly what the Belt and Road Initiative is, but they are sure of one thing that it is not. It is not, they insist, a Chinese Marshall plan for the 21st century.
For the Chinese Communist party, the US-led effort to rebuild western Europe was as much a political project as an economic one, aimed at containing the Soviet Union and its eastern allies. Such associations with President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy project are not welcome in Beijing. “[The BRI] is neither a Marshall plan nor a geostrategic concept,” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said last month, adding it was better described as an attempt to “build a community with a shared future for mankind together with other countries around the globe”.
Mr Xi also recently characterised it as “an economic co-operation initiative, not a geopolitical or military alliance”.