The implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative has improved lives throughout the Global South, experts said during an online seminar on Saturday, contradicting "debt trap" smears the initiative has drawn from some Western media outlets.
Scholars, journalists, and politicians from both developing countries, such as Pakistan, Iran, and Zambia, and developed countries, including Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom, participated in the webinar titled Building a multipolar world — Ten years of the Belt and Road Initiative, which was co-organized by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group.
Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute at Fudan University, attributed the initiative's success to China's "hard power" capability to provide developing countries with total solutions for traditional infrastructure, such as railways, and for digital and green infrastructure.
"It is also because of the soft power of the initiative, in which China and its partner countries discuss together, build together, and benefit together," Zhang said, adding that the consultations include business groups, political personalities, and different parties within participating countries.
Erik Solheim, president of the Green Belt and Road Institute and formerly executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, used the Mombasa-Nairobi standard gauge railway in Kenya as an example of how the BRI can benefit local people.
"I can see that 10 years of the Belt and Road Initiative has been an astonishing success," he said. "The background color for the Belt and Road is green."
He said a "watershed moment" for that green development came in 2021, when China announced it would cease investment in overseas coal-fired power plants.
"China is now the very leader of everything green," Solheim said, saying around 60 to 80 percent of every green technologies are now employed in China, and that people in the West do not realize that fact because of enormous negative campaigns by many Western media organizations.
"Criticism that the Belt and Road was 'gray', focusing on coal and oil and gas, there wasn't truth in that in the very beginning," he said.
Mushahid Hussain Sayed, chairman of the Pakistan-China Institute and a senator in Pakistan, said he is already seeing an irreversible shift in the global balance of economic, political, and cultural power from the West to the East.
"Ten years ago, when no other country was willing to invest in Pakistan as the situation was very volatile, the Chinese leadership and the Communist Party of China invested and gave a vote of confidence to the people of Pakistan," he said, citing the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is one of the BRI's flagship projects.
"BRI is all about people-centric development and in this context I feel that the best of BRI is yet to come because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a 15-year project started in 2015 to 2030," said Hussain, who added that Pakistan's prime minister was in Beijing last month to sign new agreements with China to develop agriculture, IT, and education.
Fred M'membe, president of Socialist Party Zambia, echoed Hussain saying there is growing evidence that leading players in the Global South are increasingly impatient with the underhand way the West cast the dice in its favor in world economics.
"There has been so much propaganda about the BRI, that it is a 'debt trap', instead the BRI makes it possible for us to industrialize and to get out of the West's debt trap," he said. "They can go on with propaganda after propaganda against China and the BRI. But if they do not put anything in place that makes our lives better, that improves the living conditions of our people, that gives us a chance to industrialize and develop, that propaganda and those lies and deceit will evaporate very quickly."
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