Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is continuing with his tour across the Eurasian continent. Kazakhstan is the only country that has established comprehensive strategic partnership with China among the five Central Asian nations. Serbia, which he is also visiting, plays an important role in China's relations with Central and Eastern European nations and is the first country in the region to set up a strategic partnership with China.
In September, 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping introduced the initiative of the Silk Road economic belt at Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev University, which will inject new impetus into the global economy.
Li will also attend the fifth summit of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Economic Cooperation in Thailand, the final leg of his Eurasian journey. Launched by the Asian Development Bank in 1992, GMS involves China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Silk Road Fund granted last month and the proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank will offer financing for GMS members and other Asian states to develop infrastructure projects. This will promote regional interconnection and meet the urgent demand of some countries for more jobs and greater energy security.
Beijing has not only put forward the Silk Road economic belt initiative, but also spared no effort to put it in place with a series of measures. Nevertheless, an increasing number of Chinese strategists are concerned about potential troubles China may come across in this process.
The Chinese government can guide enterprises to play a leading role in compliance with the norms of a market economy. Many Central Asian and Central and Eastern European countries have a lagging understanding of China and take it for granted that the Chinese government can completely override enterprises in making decisions. Quite a few Chinese entrepreneurs are worrying over a low rate of return on investment in mega infrastructure projects, an unfavorable commercial environment and lack of legal safeguards, which will force them to bear imponderable political and security risks.
Plus, there are clear differences between China and most countries along the Silk Road in terms of development. Beijing should probe intensively into the development needs of others instead of arbitrarily making decisions for them. More importantly, countries falling far behind China in economic growth will deem over-reliance upon their giant neighbor an unacceptable threat to their national security.
China still lacks sufficient study of countries along the Silk Road as well as a full-fledged diplomatic ability to tackle complicated challenges. At present, China suffers from a severe deficit of experts on Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe and a shrinking number of students studying languages of those countries. Without profound understanding of the delicate political, social and economic transformations in these nations, we can never expect any safe and predictable investment and trading activities.
Furthermore, the fierce contention for water, energy and food among Central Asian countries is far beyond the imagination of many Chinese. And the EU has been thwarting Central and Eastern European countries from using China's concessional loans by numerous means and preventing Chinese firms from participating in the construction of major infrastructure including networks, highways and ports.
Many politicians of countries sitting along the Silk Road are anxious to cooperate with China for the sake of their own political interests.
However, opposition parties and pervasive bureaucracy make their collaboration with China rather vulnerable. After all, Chinese enterprises remain in the primary stage of globalization and have yet to get accustomed to sophisticated local politics, while the Chinese government is increasingly reluctant to foot the bill for mistakes of the companies .
Xi stressed at the second Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs in late November that China must safeguard its development opportunity and space, create a mutually beneficial cooperation network and configure a powerful partnership network around the globe.
This was an impressive declaration, but how to utilize smart power to realize these ambitions is a huge challenge for Beijing.
The author is a research fellow with the Charhar Institute and an adjunct fellow with the Center for International and Strategic Studies, Peking University. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn