United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres attended the sixth annual forum, held in Beijing, to honor China’s ambitious multinational infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative. As described by the World Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative “aims to strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment links between China and some 65 other countries that account collectively for over 30 percent of global GDP, 62 percent of population, and 75 percent of known energy reserves.” The links, involving networks of ports, rails and roads, include countries in Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Gulf Countries, and North Africa. China is also extending its initiative to Europe, where it has made significant investments in ports.
Secretary General Guterres was effusive in his praise of China and its Belt and Road Initiative, which he said will benefit the world and help accelerate the achievement of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015. “I want to recognize China for its central role as a pillar of international cooperation and multilateralism,” the Secretary General said. “The five pillars of the Belt and Road – policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people exchanges – are intrinsically linked to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These are conceptual pillars that can be translated into real-life progress for people.”
Secretary General Guterres left out of his encomium some real-world facts. The Belt and Road Initiative is not all milk and honey for the countries on the receiving end of China’s extended helping hand. “Some countries complained about unsustainable debt, while others criticized the overwhelming numbers of Chinese workers imported for construction,” the New York Times reported.
China, for example, used the leverage of Sri Lanka’s huge unpaid debts owed to Chinese state-owned companies to take control of a strategic port that was Chinese-financed. Along with the port came control of thousands of acres of surrounding land. China effectively used the Belt and Road Initiative as a debt trap to force Sri Lanka to give up some sovereign territory. China’s prize, as the New York Times observed, was gaining “control of territory just a few hundred miles off the shores of a rival, India, and a strategic foothold along a critical commercial and military waterway.”
China’s motives for launching and implementing the Belt and Road Initiative were not primarily anchored in the “international cooperation and multilateralism” that Secretary General Guterres attributed to China’s leadership. As reported in an article regarding the Belt and Road Initiative appearing in Congressional Quarterly last January, “The Belt and Road Initiative has translated into greater Chinese geopolitical influence in member countries, a development that has unsettled U.S., African and Western officials, according to China-watchers.” China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be more accurately described as a China First policy.
Secretary General Guterres’s praise of “China’s leadership on climate action” was also overstated. He focused only on the positive narrative, pointing out in his remarks at the Belt and Road Initiative forum that in 2017 “China invested over $125 billion dollars in renewable energy, an increase of at least 25 per cent over the previous year.” He neglected to mention the surge of new coal-fired power plants being constructed in China. According to a report prepared in 2018 by CoalSwarm, “259 Gigawatts (GW) of new capacity are under development in China, comparable to the entire U.S. coal fleet (266 GW). If built, the new plants will increase China’s current coal fleet of 993 GW by 25%.”
When China presented its individual targets for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions in connection with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which was concluded with much fanfare on Barack Obama’s watch in December 2015, it committed only to “achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030.” China may fall short of even that low bar it had set for itself. “For climate prospects, adding 259 GW of new coal power capacity to the Chinese coal fleet is wildly out of line with the goals of the international Paris agreement, no matter what their start date,” CoalSwarm stated in its report.
Finally, human rights went unmentioned in Secretary General Guterres’ remarks at the Belt and Road Initiative forum, even though human rights are supposed to be one of the three pillars of the United Nations Charter. The other two are economic development and international peace and security.
It is understandable that the Secretary General did not want to go out of his way to offend his hosts. Moreover, in fairness to Secretary General Guterres, he may have planned to raise any troublesome issues on his mind in his private discussions with President Xi and other Chinese government leaders. However, this does not mean that Secretary General Guterres should have used the prestige of his office to provide an unalloyed promotion of the China First policy known as the Belt and Road Initiative
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres attended the sixth annual forum, held in Beijing, to honor China’s ambitious multinational infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative. As described by the World Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative “aims to strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment links between China and some 65 other countries that account collectively for over 30 percent of global GDP, 62 percent of population, and 75 percent of known energy reserves.” The links, involving networks of ports, rails and roads, include countries in Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Gulf Countries, and North Africa. China is also extending its initiative to Europe, where it has made significant investments in ports.
