The Belt and Road Initiative
what is actually achieved. This is because officials at the ground level have to follow what is told by their superiors in order to implement their political ideas of promoting transparency and the green agenda. However, this has not happened. For example, there appears to be no significant relationship between economic activity and project construction activity for five of the six economic corridors planned within the BRI. Only the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) shows considerable project activity, and this is only because the CPEC has been used as the flagship corridor for the BRI (Hillman, 2020). This lack of alignment shows the extent to which the BRI is decentralized, and companies are allowed to pursue their own policy of earning as much profit as possible. This often involves corruption, leading to more unfinished projects. This is only fuelled by the BRI's opacity, which ranges from failing to publish any complete lists of BRI projects to refusing to disclose the amount of debt owned by foreign nations, protecting project managers from scrutiny when they fail to complete a project. This, in turn, fuels corruption, which also becomes hard to uncover as it incentivizes officials on the ground to remain opaque in their dealings. This makes it hard to know how much money is lost. China’s reforms to ensure sustainability appear to be primarily motivated by economic intentions, not political. The reforms aim to ensure that Chinese businesses in the renewable sector continue to expand in BRI countries. After all, the lack of environmental safeguards is one of the most criticized aspects of BRI projects, and the promotion of fossil fuel industries remains rampant. This can be seen in how Chinese banks and corporations have invested in 240 coal projects in BRI host nations, and 61% of the energy-sector loans financed entirely by China Development Bank and China Eximbank were in fossil fuels from 2014 to 2017 (BRI Development Index, 2023). Furthermore, although the government issued some guidance on overseas investment, business associations, and supervision commissions, no regulatory mechanism or law enforcement was established to ensure the compliance of enterprises operating. This can be seen with the Batang Toru Hydropower Project. The project is run by Sinohydro, China's state-owned hydropower company, and is subsidized by the Bank of China through the BRI. This project has caused the blasting of a cave, flooding a vast expanse of jungle and, most importantly, potentially destroying the remaining habitats of the Tapanuli orangutan species, a critically endangered species. Multilateral financiers such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation deemed this project too ecologically harmful to fund (Batung Toru Hydropower Project, 2020). This highlights the lack of internal regulation of the BRI, as the CCP refuses to introduce transparency or adequate safeguards to ensure sustainability. This lack of central authority means that the driver of the project tends to be individuals or firms whose sole motive is profit. As the Batang Toru Dam project highlights, this causes projects to sacrifice the environmental protectionism emphasized by the CCP in favour of profit. This means that the efforts to promote sustainability remain mostly half-hearted and are abandoned at the first signs that it would hamper profits, making the BRI less of a political project and more of an economic one. The claims that the BRI is maliciously politically motivated seem even less likely under closer scrutiny. The picture of the development of the Hambantota ports lacks crucial information. Firstly, it was done as a lease. This implies that the port would still fall under Sri Lankan legal jurisdiction. Consequently, China would not have full ownership of the port and would remain subject to Sri Lankan laws and regulations. In this sense, Sri Lanka's government still has ultimate authority over the port (Polymatter, 2022). Secondly, it is crucial to understand why the port was leased to China. It was not because China forced Sri Lanka to sell the land to pay off its loans to China. It was because Sri Lanka
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