China’s Belt and Road Initiative has gotten a lot of attention during the past two years, with an expanding list of country supporters and growing capital outlays for projects.
The initiative has gotten so ambitious, in fact, Western countries concerned with its reach are aligning to offer competing initiatives. At the end of September, Japan and the European Union signed an infrastructure cooperation pact that will help coordinate infrastructure, transport and digital projects.
“The E.U.-Japan agreement repeatedly stresses the importance of projects being sustainable both environmentally and fiscally — a veiled swipe at the Belt and Road Initiative, which critics say saddles countries with vast debts to Chinese companies that they cannot repay,” reports Bloomberg.
Japan’s latest infrastructure pact comes after it signed a similar agreement with the United States and Australia in 2018 to invest in countries across Asia and the Pacific. At the time, the plan was described by The Telegraph as “an apparent attempt to counter the growing influence of China, whose massive Belt and Road Initiative could involve as much as £760 billion [$961 billion] of spending over the next decade.”
The same report noted Australia had recently helped to fund a South Pacific communications network to prevent it from being built by Chinese company Huawei.
Indonesia, meanwhile, is reported to possibly be seeking a similar deal with the United States.
“According to comments [Jared Kushner] made in Jakarta on 3 October, one of the topics addressed by the pair was closer collaboration on infrastructure projects in Indonesia,” writes Jarryd de Haan, research analyst at the Indo-Pacific Research Program. “As a result of the discussions, Indonesia will reportedly offer the U.S. projects in North Sumatra, North Kalimantan, North Sulawesi and Bali, which make up the four regional comprehensive economic corridors. Indonesia had previously offered the same projects, worth $91.1 billion, to China.”
All the competition between nations is creating a huge market for infrastructure projects in the initiative’s target markets — Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
