"How China’s Ambitious Belt and Road Plans for East Africa Came Apart" 5 March 2022

As China draws back from large scale infrastructure investments in Africa, it is worth considering why so many major Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in the region, unveiled with great fanfare, have ultimately struggled. A connecting thread across such cases has been China’s inability to manage the political complexities associated with infrastructure development. [...]

The BRI was envisioned as an extension of this top-down “China Model” of infrastructure development to other countries. But, of course, the political circumstances familiar to Chinese actors at home are seldom duplicated abroad – despite the fact that, according to Ding Yifan of China’s Development Research Centre of the State Council, Chinese companies often “think other countries are just like China.”

Chinese actors typically approach BRI deals with two contradictory assumptions: First, the political leadership with whom they are dealing is either too weak or too venal to challenge contract terms that decidedly favor China; and, second, these same leaders will be strong enough to fend off resistance to ambitious infrastructure projects by opposition politicians and civil society groups while also mobilizing the financial resources necessary to sustain expensive, long term projects.

In practice, few projects meet the “just right” conditions of this Goldilocks formula. Instead, conditions are “too hot” – strong leaders reject unfavorable terms – or “too cold” – weak leaders cannot defend bad deals against domestic opposition or rescue the projects once they run into trouble. [...]