“What the COVID-19 Pandemic May Mean for China's Belt and Road Initiative”, 17 March 2020

… it [the coronavirus pandemic] has already highlighted some of the frailties of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)… China has constructed its loosely-governed, $1 trillion infrastructure initiative to ensure that Beijing reaps many of the benefits, but this structure of governance has also created significant foreign dependencies upon China. Most BRI infrastructure contracts are given to Chinese companies, most projects rely overwhelmingly on Chinese labor and supplies, and BRI depends on the availability of massive amounts of cheap credit from Chinese banks…

… China’s COVID-19 response all but halted the Belt and Road Initiative in its tracks. Work ceased along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Cambodia’s Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone came to standstill, and projects across Indonesia, Myanmar, and Malaysia became stuck in holding patterns. A freeze on the flow of Chinese labor is a significant factor in these disruptions, with thousands of Chinese workers unable to return to their country of work… The longer that Chinese workers are unable to return to projects overseas, the longer the projects will languish incomplete, and some may be abandoned altogether (a phenomenon not unheard of, even within BRI’s short track record).

The COVID-19 crisis has also hampered China’s manufacturing supply chains, and BRI projects are predominantly reliant on Chinese, rather than local, materials and supplies. The pandemic has compromised the global supply chains that keep BRI projects moving forward, limiting the goods flowing  out of China… The global shipping industry was slowed to the point that more tonnage of container ships was idled around the world in February than during the worst points of the 2008 financial crisis…

Moreover, China is facing down the COVID-19 public health challenge with its economy slowing to the lowest rates in three decades…

It is far too soon to know, however, the extent to which many BRI countries themselves will be affected by the pandemic…  If BRI were based on a different model of governance, however—centered on locally sourcing workers, suppliers, and manufacturers, engaging international infrastructure-building experts, and focusing on building local capacity—these shocks would almost certainly be differently felt…