One Belt One Road and China’s Alternative Blueprint for Economic Governance in Asia

One Belt One Road (OBOR) is probably the most significant of the regional initiatives promoted during the Xi era. It envisions the creation of a new Silk Road linking China with Central Asia and Russia, up to Turkey and Eastern Europe, and a Maritime Silk Road linking the South of China with South-East Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf, up to the Mediterranean. The project foresees the strengthening of commercial links, as well as the construction of new infrastructures, such as high-speed transcontinental railways, and new ports. With OBOR, China promotes a new paradigm for regional economic governance, aimed at advancing Chinese interests, norms and values. Through OBOR, China aims at proposing an alternative to current approaches to global and regional governance, largely rooted in norms and approaches originating in, and promoted by, the West. This article will analyse the OBOR initiative from three main perspectives. Firstly, it will describe the narrative that helped the Chinese leadership to conceptualize and legitimize the One Belt One Road Initiative. In particular, it will describe how Beijing adopted several neo-Confucian and post-colonial ideas to legitimize the role of China as “natural leader” of the Asian region, and to present its blueprint for regional governance as an element of stability and mutual cooperation, rather than as an attempt to establish a sphere of influence over the continent. In the second section, the article will describe which economic interests China aims to fulfil through this project. Firstly, OBOR aims to contribute to the development of Western provinces that were largely left behind by the export-led development of the last decades. Secondly, it will favour the Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that receive the lion’s share of the infrastructural projects, and will be able to accelerate their “going global” strategy. Finally, OBOR represents the prosecution of the trend defined as “advancement of the state, retreat of the private” (guojin mintui), namely, the consolidation of the state control on strategic economic sectors. In the final section, the article will discuss the possible political dilemmas generated by this initiative, including the likely contradiction between the expansion of the Chinese role and the maintenance of key foreign policy principles, such as non-interference and respect of other states’ sovereignty.