1 - What is this book about?

Summary

After years of struggling under austerity imposed by European partners and a chilly shoulder from the United States, Greece has embraced the advances of China, its most ardent and geopolitically ambitious suitor … While Europe was busy squeezing Greece, the Chinese swooped in with bucket- loads of investments that have begun to pay off, not only economically but also by apparently giving China a political foothold in Greece, and by extension, in Europe.

Horowitz and Alderman (2017)

In Greece, China has used its checkbook to take the port of Piraeus, … accomplishing what the Persian King Xerxes failed to do with overwhelming force twenty- five hundred years ago.

Hillman (2020: 23)

A train of thought that presents China's global economic activities as an attempt at political domination has become commonplace over the last decade. Books, journal articles, policy reports and political speeches from around the world began to warn of China's new- found assertiveness. At the same time, Xi Jinping suddenly seemed eager to loudly proclaim his ambitions and emerge from the sidelines of global politics. Take the examples above, which suggest China used economic power as a way to acquire a political foothold in Greece (where even Xerxes failed, no less). What motives might the authors be suggesting? To what ends will this “political foothold” be used? Will China build a new Sinocentric world order? Will it push out the US and the West, one country at a time? Will it write the last chapter of its long revenge for the century of humiliation? This appealing argument has captured public imagination about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, the Initiative, sometimes called “OBOR” due to its Mandarin name yi dai yi lu 一带一路, literally “One Belt One Road”). However, there are four main problems with the logic behind this perception that prompted us to write this book at the end of the BRI's first decade.

The first issue is that this narrative is self- perpetuating and addictive. If we start off believing that Chinese activities are part of an imperialist plan to dominate the world, we can easily pile up evidence that this is happening simply by reframing all economic deals, loans, trade agreements and new infrastructure projects as shrewd moves on a global chessboard.