The Belt and Road Initiative
2019). By promoting transparency, the CCP hopes to mitigate concerns about its geopolitical aims; it also wants the BRI to be understood as politically reputable international project.
The CCP, indeed Xi Jinping himself, also claims that the BRI is a project designed to promote sustainability. He will promote the BRI's 'philosophy of open, green and clean cooperation'. In this case, Beijing claims that combatting climate change is a political project involving lobbying international partners and exercising political power and authority (Xi, 2019). This is true, to an extent. After all, through the BRI, China has issued around $2.2 trillion of outstanding green loans, and nearly $156 billion of outstanding green bonds (bonds where the proceeds are used to fund projects that positively impact the environment exclusively) (Chao and Gawel, 2022). Blue bonds are a thematic subset of green bonds and have also been issued. The Bank of China, a government-controlled bank, issued $942.5 million in blue bonds in September 2020 (Chao and Gawel, 2022). The CCP claims that these projects have been implemented because of the benefits they provide to the environment and not because they prioritize economic value. They claim that this emphasis on the environment is shown by the risk Beijing has taken by being one of the first to issue blue bonds on such a large scale despite their relative novelty. In truth, there may be some political intentions, but none of them appear to be malicious. After all, this is one of Beijing's most significant foreign projects. The BRI is used to carry out favours with countries that China may want as allies in their developing Cold War against the USA. For example, China persuaded Pakistan to vote against the bringing of the debate of the oppression of Uyghurs into the UN. In exchange, Pakistan received extra funding from China for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (Aryal, 2022). Furthermore, as a rising superpower, China needs allies and alliances and 'exclusionary blocs', and the BRI acts as a mechanism for this. For example, in 2022, Nicaragua openly declared that they recognized the PRC as the legitimate China and officially severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan a month before joining the BRI. This shows that the BRI is explicitly designed as a geopolitical tool to expand influence. China gives these nations money, and in exchange, recipient nations give China international support. This procedure works well. This is why the average sentiment towards the BRI remains somewhat positive, at 0.57 on the index (greater than 0 indicates a positive attitude) (Garcia- Herrero and Schindowski, 2023). However, these political concerns are prioritized far less due to developments on the ground. Although Xi may want to ensure that the BRI remains reputable, it does not want to do this by encouraging transparency. Instead, it lacks oversight and is opaque by design, leading to discrepancies between what officials say will happen and what happens on the ground, meaning there are multiple contradicting visions of the BRI. Overall, this project is designed avoid the scrutiny of charitable organizations, international entities, and analysts. The BRI can be more accurately described as a loose collection of projects. After all, a BRI project has no official definition as long as it meets the principles of open cooperation, tolerance and amity, mutual benefit and win-win which are all very vague criteria (Yuzhu, 2019). Many of these same features may be seen in projects supported by China in non-BRI projects. This can be seen in how fashion events, art exhibitions, marathons, domestic travel, dentistry, and other unrelated activities have all been incorporated within the BRI brand, even if these were projects started years before. The ever-expanding loose nature leads to problems with what China claims, when there is a massive discrepancy between what officials want and
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