Rehabilitating BRI

Beijing seeks to project a better image of its giant infra scheme

At the second — and more understated — Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China announced it would invest $1 trillion in the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI. Other estimates of the proposed spending over the next decade are even higher — Morgan Stanley has predicted it will total $1.3 trillion by 2027, and that is on the lower side of these estimates. The hosts of the forum also declared that Chinese companies had invested $90 billion in the various BRI countries. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Beijing’s pockets are bottomless — there are ambitious