Belt and Road is by Bruno Maçães. The subtitle is "A Chinese World Order".
I was not a fan of Belt and Road. I wasn't able to learn much from it. This was partly because I'd already heard some of these stories just from reading the news, and partly because the writing style didn't work for me. The author seemed to jump from idea to idea very quickly, without enough overarching layout to the narrative. At other times he seemed to jump from data, to analysis, to speculation in a way that really didn't work for me. (He didn't use sub-headings in the chapters, which may have been helpful to organize the arguments and constrain how fast he let himself jump from one point to another.)
I felt there wasn't enough clear explanation of what the Belt and Road initiative actually is, (even though the first chapter is titled "What is the Belt and Road?") although in fairness, he does refer to it as a "vague and ductile" framework, serving a variety of purposes. But a better book would take that uncertainty and explain it more clearly, both conceptually and geographically.
Value Chains
One idea that did spark my interest is his discussion of economic "value chains". In our global world economy, no one country produces every aspect of a product from start to finish. Instead, high-income countries want to have a role in the chain of production where there is a lot of value-added, and thus a high profit:
The units facing each other in the global market are no longer nations but value chains—and that changes everything.
So the Belt and Road Initiative is an effort to build more value chains where China (Chinese companies) are playing a high-value role:
“The return on investment for a port in Sri Lanka or a rail line in Thailand matters less to Chinese officials than the ability to push participating countries to adopt Chinese standards on everything from construction to finance to data management.” ...
When it comes to the division of labor along the value chains of industrial production, positions and preferences that reflect the national interests of countries in the regions of the Belt and Road may differ or even contradict each other... China, as the promoter of the initiative, is uniquely placed to pursue its interests...
Once goods are produced in several countries as the combined result of an intricate division of labor in each value chain, things become more difficult. What a country wants is to pick and choose the best segments in each value chain. Industrial policy increasingly targets tasks rather than industries, but for that, a government would have to gain access to the levers of industrial policy in other countries...
In order to achieve those goals, China is making investments (and perhaps influencing politics) in other countries, much like America in the 1900s:
The realization that China was now highly dependent on foreign markets made it clear that some level of political influence over the latter would have to be developed. European countries in the nineteenth century and then America in the twentieth had been pushed in that direction. China might be forced to do the same.
It's not a strategy without risks — the stories of what happens to these loans and whether they're "fair" come up in a variety of news stories I've come across over the last few years about the Belt and Road Initiative:
If it takes on the bulk of the financing costs for the Belt and Road, risks to its financial system may go into the red, but if it attempts to push those risks onto participant countries, it will ensure that investments become divisive political issues, poisoning relations between China and other countries.
Verdict: Overall, I wasn't a fan of Belt and Road. There must be a better book out there about the Belt and Road Initiative.