Lessons from China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Strategic Pathways for the EU’s Global Gateway

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been written into the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution, it has branded over 800 billion dollars’ worth of financial flows, and it has been the subject of countless articles and academic papers. And yet, over a decade since the BRI’s launch, persistent misconceptions about the initiative continue to colour its portrayal.

The BRI is often understood to be a cohesive network of economic corridors, strategically crafted to enhance China’s global influence. Its actual structure is far more complex, reflecting ad-hoc decision-making by local governments, state-owned enterprises, and other actors. This decentralisation is both a strength and a weakness of the BRI, enabling flexibility while also resulting in uneven project quality and long-term sustainability.

Rather than a monolithic, centrally coordinated blueprint for global development, the BRI is, in reality, a loosely organised and disparate bundle of projects attached to a high-level policy concept. This paper seeks to dispel some persistent myths about the BRI and establish what the initiative actually means for the world. Understanding the BRI is vital, not only because it is a defining Chinese foreign policy concept, but because it has catalysed significant responses from other actors, including the EU, which in September 2021, unveiled its Global Gateway strategy.

This paper also investigates the BRI with a view to establishing what Global Gateway (GG) might learn from the Chinese initiative. GG is not explicitly framed as a response to the BRI and Brussels has rightly communicated that GG should be assessed on its own merits. However, the comparison with the BRI is inescapable.

GG is part of a wider EU course-correction, brought about by China’s challenge to the status quo as a rising power. Although media reports often bill GG as an “alternative” to the BRI, it was the BRI that initially positioned itself as a Chinese alternative to the existing Westerndominated development landscape in which the EU has long been a leading player.

The GG responds to the BRI and is therefore predicated on an assumption that there is something in the Chinese approach worth responding to. This paper will interrogate that assumption, looking more closely at what exactly about the BRI merits a response.

Although the two initiatives reflect divergent political and economic contexts—China’s state-driven model versus Europe’s market-led and rules-based approach—they both represent competing visions for global development. While bearing in mind the significant differences between the EU and China as policy actors, this paper will explore the BRI’s successes and failures to determine what GG should take away from China’s BRI.

The paper is structured in four parts: 

• Section one provides a discussion of what the BRI really means, focused on common misunderstandings about the initiative.
• Section two assesses the BRI’s achievements and shortcomings.
• Section three considers GG and what lessons the EU might be able to draw from the preceding assessment of the BRI.
• Section four includes more specific policy recommendations for the GG.