Designed to dwarf even the Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe after World War II, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first unveiled by President Xi Jinping in a 2013 speech at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.
Beijing later pledged to invest US$1 trillion, and by some estimates as much as $8 trillion, in roads, railways, bridges, ports and other infrastructure projects around the world, with an emphasis on sparking economic development in the underfinanced Global South.
Originally called One Belt, One Road, the BRI was meant to usher in what Xi described in his speech as a more just world order. But on many counts, the program has not measured up to its original, world-changing ambition.
Thirteen years after its launch, many observers and analysts now see the BRI as more of a liability than an asset to China’s plan to forge a post-America-led world order. In one of the first signs of retreat, Xi recast the BRI as “small and beautiful” in November 2021, saying the emphasis should shift to smaller, less costly projects in areas such as clean energy and technology.
The pivot has reshaped the initiative – once portrayed as driven by developing-world uplift, but now clearly more profit-seeking than altruistic – rather than ending it.
BRI projects have since become more transactional, aimed at securing energy and minerals, acquiring equity stakes in developing-world natural resources and finding overseas buyers for China’s surplus industrial output amid rising Western protectionism, rather than advancing Xi’s once-grand vision of a more equitable alternative to supposed Western exploitation of the Global South.
For many developing nations, BRI-related loans have become a new type of financial albatross, pushing them deep into debt to China with scant prospects of repaying at the initial interest rates and terms.
It has also caused financial strain among Chinese financial institutions directed by Beijing to issue BRI-related loans and credit facilities, which have struggled to collect on those debts.
China’s two main policy banks, China Development Bank and China Eximbank, carry particularly high exposure to non-performing loans in low- and middle-income countries, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary University.
That NPL situation will likely get worse before it gets better: AidData estimates that 55% of those loans have already entered their principal repayment periods, a share scheduled to rise to 75% by 2030.
BRI-related financial trouble comes as China’s once-spectacular economic growth structurally slows from double-digit and high single-digit rates of previous decades. The International Monetary Fund projects China’s economy will expand about 4.6% in 2026 and 4.1% in 2027, down from the 5% the government targeted and claimed to have hit right on the dot in 2024 and 2025.
Beijing’s attempts to swap unpaid loans for equity have met with only moderate success and sparked nationalistic firestorms in some BRI-recipient nations. In December 2017, unable to service the heavy commercial loans used to build the underperforming deep-sea port at Hambantota on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, the Colombo government signed a 99-year lease giving China Merchants Port Holdings a 70% controlling stake.
Laos, already one of Asia’s poorest countries, accumulated enormous external debt under the BRI to pay for large-scale infrastructure projects, including power plants and a high-speed railway linking the capital, Vientiane, to Boten on the Chinese border and onward into China.
Faced with a debt crisis caused by its inability to repay BRI loans on their original terms, the government agreed to hand majority control of a large part of Électricité du Laos, the state corporation that runs the country’s power generation, transmission and distribution, to the Chinese state-owned China Southern Power Grid Company.
BRI critics once feared the scheme was a calculated master plan for Chinese global domination. From the start, however, the reality was very different. A major weakness in carrying out Xi’s vision is that no central government body has ever overseen BRI projects, and it remains unclear to this day which ministry or ministries are responsible for them.
Yuen Yuen Ang, a prominent political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in a 2018 essay that the BRI’s modus operandi was “typical of China, where the central government often issues broad directives and expects lower-ranking officials to figure out how to fulfill them.”
The hallmark of such communist-style mass campaigns, Ang argued, is frenzied enthusiasm and little coordination. Vast resources and human capital are mobilized toward one goal. Banks, businesses and officials across the country join in en masse rather than dividing up responsibilities, as local governments rush to satisfy what they perceive to be their superiors’ wishes.
In the BRI’s early days, Beijing sought to win global friends with fanciful schemes, including an indoor ski slope near the beaches of Australia’s Gold Coast, a spa in the Czech Republic and cultural centers and amusement parks in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Italy, Hungary and Serbia. None of them were ever built.
There was even a BRI coloring book for children, underscoring the enterprise’s haphazard nature. Italy, the only G7 nation to join the BRI, withdrew when its initial five-year term expired in 2023, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni saying joining was a “mistake.”
In late 2023, the Philippine government officially announced it had withdrawn from funding talks for several railway projects once linked to BRI. In 2016, China had pledged $24 billion in investment projects, including under BRI, but little of that amount materialized. Panama formally quit BRI in 2025, becoming the first Latin American country to do so.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which links China’s Xinjiang region to ports on the Arabian Sea, has been seen as something of a BRI success story. But it has left Pakistan heavily indebted to China.
China is now Pakistan’s largest bilateral creditor, holding about $28.8 billion, or 22% of the country’s total external debt, according to the World Bank’s most recent International Debt Report.
The US State Department, in a May report to Congress, said Pakistan has the highest absolute debt to China of any country, and that most of it stems from the $62 billion corridor.
While China has agreed to roll over, refinance, and restructure some of the debt, it has held firm on repayment for the bulk of it at originally agreed interest rates. That forced Islamabad to turn to the IMF for a $7 billion bailout in September 2024, pushing the country back toward Western-led lenders to repay its China debt.
Resentment runs deepest in Balochistan, where resistance to BRI projects has often been violent. In the first half of 2026, the Balochistan Liberation Army, a local separatist group, carried out more than 100 attacks on police, military and paramilitary forces, as well as BRI projects those forces are deployed to protect. Dozens of Chinese nationals, including BRI project engineers and managers, have been targeted and killed in recent years.
It is too early to say what effect BRI’s failure to achieve its initial lofty goals will have on Xi personally. At least in part, the initiative sought to secure Xi’s place in the pantheon of China’s great leaders. Mao Zedong destroyed the old, corrupt feudal order and unified a then-fragmented country. Deng Xiaoping, once derisively branded a “capitalist roader,” lived up to that moniker and laid the foundations of China’s modern economy.
Xi has sought to transform China from an economic growth machine into a global political and military power, one that will eventually surpass the US as the world’s most powerful nation. But 13 years after its launch in Kazakhstan, Xi’s signature program has morphed into something much smaller and more transactional than his original vision for forging a more equitable world with China at its benevolent center.
Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and author of “The End of the Chinese Century? How Xi Jinping Lost the Belt and Road Initiative.” Purchase the book here.
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