 All right, good afternoon everyone and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Jennifer Statz and I am the director of our East and Southeast Asia programs here at USIP. And it's my great pleasure to have you here today for our event on the Belt and Road. So thank you all for joining us. I know a lot of you have been here before, but for those of you who don't know USIP, we were founded by Congress as an independent, nonpartisan national institute dedicated to preventing and resolving violent conflicts around the world. We have our headquarters here in Washington, of course, but we also have teams on the ground in conflict zones all around the world, where we work with local partners to prevent conflicts from becoming violent and to help end them when they do. Here in USIP's China program, we are focused on China's growing impact on peace and conflict dynamics around the world. A big piece of that, of course, comes through China's economic engagement in fragile and conflict-affected states. And nowhere is that more apparent than through China's most ambitious foreign policy initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative. Today is a particularly auspicious day to be talking about the Belt and Road. As many of you know, today there are 37 heads of state and representatives from roughly a hundred countries gathering outside Beijing, today, tomorrow, and Saturday, for the second Belt and Road Forum. And this meeting comes at a particularly important time as Beijing is seeking to counter growing criticism of the project, but also recalibrate its approach for the future. The excitement that accompanied the initial promise of Chinese largesse has given way to a much more fulsome consideration of the risks that come with building and financing infrastructure in developing countries. In addition, there are other countries and institutions, including the United States, that have started to put together or refine their own connectivity and development programs. Now much of the discussion about Belt and Road has really been at the extremes, from the lofty promises coming out of Beijing to the dire warnings about China's true strategic intentions. But at the same time, the details about Belt and Road remain extremely fuzzy, from the breathless quotes of one or four or eight trillion dollars in potential investment, to the difficulty in estimating the actual dollar value of projects that have broken ground thus far, and the secrecy that surrounds the details of many of the projects themselves. Today, we are going to try to dispel some of that mystery and bring some clarity to the discussion. In our first panel, we will examine cross-regional trends and concerns about the Belt and Road, alternatives to the Chinese model of investment and development, and strategies for increasing sustainability of international development efforts for at large. The second panel will examine the on-the-ground impact of the Belt and Road in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and the implications the project has for conflict dynamics in these regions. I will now turn it over to our very capable moderators, who will guide us through today's discussion. Patty Kim and Jacob Stokes are two senior policy analysts who have recently joined USIP, and they are responsible for conceptualizing today's event and really making it happen. So very grateful for their efforts, and want to thank them for all of their work to make this possible. Before I officially hand things over, I do want to make one administrative announcement. USIP is conducting security training today just outside this door. And what that means is there will be simulating some traumatic events. So if you hear screaming or see fake blood, please don't be alarmed. If there is an actual emergency that requires us to do something, we will absolutely let you know. But otherwise, please disregard anything you might be hearing from the stairwell. And with that, Patty, I will turn things over to you. Thanks. All right. Thank you very much, Jennifer. And I want to thank everyone for joining us here today. My name is Patricia Kim, and I'm a senior policy analyst in the China program here at USIP. We have a very exciting first panel that will start us off by giving us a broad overview of some of the trends that have emerged from BRI at year six. And we're going to delve into specifics about how BRI projects compare to other development models and investment models, concerns about BRI financing and debt. And we'll also have a chance to hear about what's going on at the grassroots level and learn about the work that's being done to help manage conflict and facilitate understanding between Chinese investors and local populations with the goal of fostering sustainable development. So we're very fortunate to have a very impressive lineup of speakers today. So starting first from my left, we have Samantha Custer, who is the director of policy analysis at aid data, which is a research lab at the College of William and Mary whose mission is to provide policymakers with rigorous analysis and tools to improve the sustainability and effectiveness of development investments. So Samantha leads a 16-person policy analysis unit at aid data, and she's published numerous studies in partnership with institutions like the World Bank, the US government, as well as foreign governments like Denmark and Germany. And prior to aid data, Samantha worked as a consultant for the World Bank, and she did her graduate studies at Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Next we have Scott Morris, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and director of the US Development Policy Initiative there. Scott is an expert on development finance issues, and he served as the deputy assistant secretary for development finance and debt at the US Treasury during the Obama administration. So in that capacity, Scott led US engagement with multilateral development banks and US participation in the Paris Club of official creditors among many other responsibilities. Before his appointment at the US Treasury, Scott was a senior staff member of the House Financial Services Committee, and he also served as the vice president of the Committee for Economic Development in Washington, D.C. Next we have Fay Yu, who is the deputy representative of Asian Development Banks, ADB's North American Representative Office in Washington. Her responsibilities include advancing shareholder support for ADB's role in the Asia-Pacific region and fostering ADB's participation in the policy dialogues that go on in North America. Before her current assignment, Fay led the ADB China Regional Knowledge Sharing Initiative based in ADB's mission in Beijing, and she also spent some time at ADB's headquarters in Manila where she led projects in the environment, natural resources, and agricultural sectors. And before her career at ADB, Fay was a professor at Colby College, and she received her PhD from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Finally last but not least, we have Pauline Mochina, who is the policy, education, and advocacy coordinator for the American Friends Services Committee, a Quaker organization founded in 1917 that seeks to advance peace and social justice through programs in the U.S. and around the world. Pauline previously served as the Senior Partnership Advisor for the United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS. She is also the founder of the African Women and Youth Initiative, which is a handmade creative design company that empowers women in Kenya to break the cycle of poverty using their own talents. And she is also the founder of the Future African Leaders Project, which provides leadership training and supports African youth in their pursuit of education. Pauline was chosen by the Huffington Post as one of 50 top international female religious leaders. She has a master's from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Union Theological Seminary. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Samantha, who will start us off with a broad overview of China's BRI investments. So Samantha, can you tell us where, why, and how China is making its BRI investments? What kind of trends do you see when you look at the massive data that you and your team are processing while you're following this issue? And can you tell us if China's approach to BRI projects have evolved over the last six years, and if so, how? Very good. Thank you so much, Patty and to all of you for being here today. Hopefully none of our remarks will provoke screaming and you will provoke joy. So in terms of maybe the first question first on cross regional trends, I'd like to highlight three of them. So first is that whether you're a skeptic or an advocate for BRI, I think it's clear to say that BRI investments represent an unprecedented opportunity for countries that often do not have access to international capital markets to be able to finance their development. At ADATA, we have a long history of tracking Chinese official finance, which is a basket of grants, concessional loans, non-concessional lending, and equity investments all directed by the Chinese government, which are done to bankroll development in other countries. And so it's important to say from the outset that China is not new to the game of investing in overseas development opportunities in other countries. And there are examples of them doing so back to the 1950s. But that said, BRI is somewhat distinct from what we've seen before in three respects. The first, I think, is the scope of its ambition. The second is the scale of new financing that it unlocks. And third, the concerted marketing effort that undergirds the initiative. One case in point of the scale of what we're talking about, one estimate that I've seen recently from CSIS estimates that if BRI is implemented at the scale at which it's currently anticipated, the result would be seven times as large as what the United States spent under the Marshall Plan to support Europe's reconstruction in World War II. So we're talking about something that is quite sizable in scale. It's important to also understand that China often bundles together different financial instruments when it's negotiating an assistance package with other partner countries. And so this could be a combination of grants and low-interest loans to export credits and loans at competitive market rates. But there's two things that even though Chinese official finance investments often don't come as cheaply to countries, they are still rather attractive in two respects. So the first is that it's often given without conditions that are favored by Western donors with regard to human rights, trade openness, political competition, environmental safeguards. Now, my observation is that there are implicit conditions that are imposed on these things, which we can talk about in the Q&A. But on the surface, there are none of the same political conditionalities that you might see with World Bank lending, for example. The second is that China is one of the few donors that have expressed an interest in financing infrastructure projects. It's not all of what BRI does, but it is an important piece of what BRI does. And Beijing has a relative monopoly among leaders who view infrastructure as a gateway to grow their economies. For example, in the East Asian Pacific region alone, China directed $48 billion in official finance to 25 countries between 2000 and 2016. This was not a balanced portfolio. 95% of those investments were in infrastructure. So you get a sense that BRI is seen as an opportunity for countries to pay for their infrastructure development. The second thing that I wanted to say as a general trend would be that Beijing's investments are strategic in that they are oriented towards generating specific economic security and reputational gains. And they're also opportunistic, though, in that they take into account local realities in recipient countries. So if you look at Beijing's investments over time, both pre and post BRI, you'll see that China directs a disproportionate amount of its less concessional lending, kind of the major share of its entire portfolio, towards countries that it deems to be high value market opportunities. So essentially, these are countries that have greater capacity to repay Chinese loans, those with larger natural resource endowments, and that have more capacity to trade with China. These are the countries that generally receive more investments from China. An example of this, again, would be in the East Asian Pacific region, where in that same time period of 2000 to 2016, 89% of its official finance was given to the populous fast growing economies of Southeast Asia. And another trend that I want to highlight here is that there is some evidence that Beijing seeks to purchase security concessions through access to capital as a quid pro quo for aligning with Chinese foreign policy interests. The strongest evidence that we've seen quantitatively to date has been with regard to buying votes in international fora, like the UN General Assembly. One study, for example, found that African countries that voted with China and the UN General Assembly just an extra 10% of the time received on average an 86% bump in concessional lending from China. We also observe similar patterns in other parts of the world, like East Asia and Pacific, so it's not really unique to Africa. The other thing I'll say is that there is compelling anecdotal evidence that China leverages the power of its purse also in regional fora, such as ASEAN, the Pacific Islands Forum, the Arctic Council, and they do so by ramping up promises of investment that are specifically targeted towards the incoming or current shares of these regional fora. And it's often around an effort to influence the discussion or the communiques that are issued from these groups. And so an example of this in practice, many people that I've interviewed in several Southeast Asian countries will point to backpedaling that was done in ASEAN with regard to countering China or reprimanding China for its actions in the South China Sea. ASEAN didn't really come out with full force to counter that. The third and final trend I want to point out in terms of cross-regional trends would be that BRI investments, even though they are unprecedented, they open up tremendous capital opportunities for countries that are cash-strapped. They have been a flash point for controversy because of Beijing's relative lack of transparency. They are a parent preference for Chinese firms and labor, as well as concerns that China is enticing countries to borrow beyond what they can repay. And I think Scott's going to deal with that a little bit in his talk. So let's talk about lack of transparency. So if you compare China to other countries like those in the OECD, you'll find that China is relatively opaque regarding the specifics of its lending practices. And this is exacerbated by the fact that Beijing's partner countries often don't disclose the terms of Chinese investments. And this lack of transparency has provoked a backlash. Many countries are beginning to cite the dangers of government officials agreeing to deals that may not be in the national interests. So these could be prestige projects or those that are very expensive in its terms because there's no public scrutiny. An example of this could be overreliance on Chinese loans that became a major source of contention in Malaysia's recent presidential election last year. Another point of controversy is that Beijing privileges Chinese firms and labor in bidding an execution of BRI projects. One estimate puts the share of Chinese firms that participate in BRI projects at over 80%. So 80% of BRI projects involve Chinese firms. That's quite high. And there's high reported use of imported Chinese labor, both skilled and unskilled. In fairness, this practice of tie date is not unique to China. DAC donors do this, too, including the US. But the policy that Beijing has of granting access to state-owned enterprises to low-interest financing hasn't really effectively enabled Chinese firms to outbid their competitors. And so you can see that this relative ease with which other countries can access Chinese capital is somewhat of a double-edged sword. You also asked a second question around how has China's approach really changed in the last six years? And I'll just highlight, again, three quick things. So one is, I would say that BRI has graduated from backyard diplomacy to a global initiative. And so what do I mean by that? In the early years, BRI I think was arguably an extension of its efforts to build relationships with the countries that were closest to it in Asia-Pacific. But the first BRI summit in 2017, I think, is something of an inflection point in that it triggered not only a greater number of countries that were signing on to cooperation agreements and MOUs with China, but it triggered a more geographically diverse membership. Case in point, as of March 2019, an estimated 125 countries and 29 international organizations had signed agreements to join BRI. That's compared to 65 in 2013. The second kind of theme, if you will, or evolution is that I think that the BRI has shifted from one characterized primarily as one of bilateral action to one that is trying to, or at least making noises about, being open to multilateral or third party or third country engagement. In the early years of BRI, China was heavily criticized for the perception that it wanted to go it alone in negotiating backdoor deals with partner country governments instead of working collaboratively with the rest of the donor community. And this dynamic irritated other donors, and it irritated countries who didn't want to be put in a position where they were becoming dependent upon China alone. In recent years, Beijing appears to be taking steps to counter this criticism through more proactively courting international finance institutions and even some bilateral donors to co-finance projects. For example, in late 2017, China hosted a meeting of the heads of all six international finance institutions in the hope of urging their participation in BRI projects. We've also seen some proposals for a joint Japan-China BRI project in Thailand over a railway system, a project possibly with Saudi Arabia to co-finance China-Pakistan's economic corridor and to collaborate with India in projects in Africa. But as I talked to people on the ground, both here in DC at some of these IFIs and also I recently just came back from Uzbekistan and talking to the donor community there, there is a sense that there's a lag between the rhetoric on high and the practice on the ground. So when I would ask people about China's role as a development partner, interviewees responded typically with a combination of uncertainty, confusion, and skepticism that China was seen as an enigma. Donor representatives would feel like they would catch fleeting glimpses of BRI projects. But there wasn't really a sense that they were actively involved in coordination discussions. And then finally, I think a unique feature of the evolution of BRI is that China has had to ramp up its marketing strategy in response to growing criticism and has had to do some major damage control as the initiative has become more popular. I think that this is a very successful branding campaign and the rhetoric is high. But I think what you can see is that the sustained attention has also provoked a lot of criticism. And so I think that the most recent summit that's happening right now essentially is an exercise, I think, in China trying to reclaim its image as a responsible partner, rather than an opportunistic one. So I'll pause there. So I actually want to ask you about you mentioned how there's often security or political concessions that China receives from the recipient countries of BRI projects. Which way is the causal arrow in that relationship? Is China sort of pouring in money to the friendly countries? Or is it countries are sort of looking to court China? And so they're starting to vote with China in the UN. Which way did that arrow go? Yeah, I think you actually see it both ways, which is very complicated. And that's why I would be hesitant to claim causal. At best you can say, OK, there's some relationship in either direction. So we do see indications that China is sizing up. Sorry, I think it goes both ways. I think China is sizing up who it seems sees as being most aligned with it in the UN General Assembly and other fora and is rewarding countries for towing the line. At the same time, I think that anecdotally and also empirically in the data, we see indications that there is some responsiveness of countries with regard to the pressure that China creates. Sometimes it's seen as compartmentalization where I have proximate economic advantages now. And if the security concerns are seen as a little bit more distant down the road, I'm going to have to make a judgment call. And that has been true in the context of the South China Sea in the East Asia Pacific, particularly. Great, thank you very much. I think this is a great segue over to Scott to dig deeper into concerns about BRI and debt. So one of the biggest criticisms of BRI is that Beijing is using the initiative to engage in debt trap diplomacy. So Scott, could you explain for us how BRI financing works? What should we really be concerned about, and what concerns might be overblown? Sure, well, thank you for the opportunity to talk about these issues. Let me start by uttering three words that no audience wants to hear, which is, I have slides, and I'm going to use them. Although that's lagging, it's not responding to what's on my screen. Maybe I won't use slide. No, it's not moving off of that screen. Yeah, well, let me, and I'll just move ahead. So I think in getting to the questions of debt, debt risk, the effects of the initiative on debt sustainability. Great. No. Let me start with a little bit broader context. Oh, excellent. Around the, there's sort of a broader question of is this initiative sustainable? And the debt dimension is a critical one in that regard. But let me offer a few other elements along the way. So I did have a series of slides that were aimed at convincing you that, as Jennifer said, a trillion, four trillion, eight trillion dollars maybe isn't so much money after all. And my point would be, and I'm not going to go into detail on all these slides, but compared to what? And I think a key question is, and based on work, frankly, that the Asian Development Bank has done on infrastructure need in Asia alone, you very quickly get to numbers that are larger than the most ambitious expression of the Belt and Road Initiative. Look at it from the dimension of climate change and estimates around the need for greening of infrastructure. And you see estimates from the work that Nick Stern has been involved in, where at the margin, you need trillions of additional dollars around the greening of infrastructure. Now there's an important question there when it comes to Belt and Road and whether or not it is achieving a greener infrastructure, and I'll come back to that. But the point is that if we consider this from a need or a demand perspective, the countries that are doing the borrowing for this infrastructure investment, these are not crazy numbers in terms of what we would expect to see an investment in infrastructure, say, over the next decade. So that's a starting point. I think there are the more critical questions of how is the initiative itself proceeding and how does that affect its sustainability? So if it's very clear that there is a demand for this stuff, is China providing it in a way that is sustainable, that it's going to be attractive to countries over time, that is going to lead to the impact on the ground that we would hope to see. So let me offer you a few pictures there. I'm gonna skip past the more direct economic considerations. But as a broader point, I think it's a measure of the overall risks in the way that China has proceeded with Belt and Road. It's a measure of that is how much they're increasingly talking about the multilateralization of Belt and Road. And now that language has been there from the beginning. I think it's always been aspirational that this would have some multilateral character to it. But I think it's become more of a pressing objective for Chinese policymakers in no small part due to the political backlash to the initiative, but backlash based on what? Well, political actors are reacting to what's been happening to the initiative. And this speaks to very concrete elements of how it's proceeded and I'll go into more detail. Certainly the debt sustainability question is a leading one, but you also have questions of environmental impact, social impact, sort of outside of the debt dimension, other commercial and sort of economic considerations associated with it. And these are all categories of issues when you actually turn to multilateral institutions. We tend to have more or less of you that these institutions listed here beside the China Development Bank, but primarily World Bank, Asian Development Bank and even the AIB, these are institutions that when they engage in infrastructure investment, they tend to lead in terms of best practice when it comes to these areas of risk that are associated with Belt and Road. So it's not a surprise that as the initiative matures, you see more and more desire to directly bring into the fold the World Bank, the ADB, to some degree the Chinese-led multilateral institution as a matter of improving the reputation of the initiative, that would be a little bit of the cynical view, but actually I think genuinely to try to improve the standards of the initiative itself in moving forward. The point of this particular slide is to provide somewhat of a check on what that could mean. So in the wildest ambitions for what is possible if we were to bring the World Bank, the ADB, fully into the Belt and Road initiative, we are not talking about a scale of financing that is a game changer, let's put it that way. So the point here is just to show what does the financing footprint look like for these institutions in total, so not just infrastructure and for the World Bank, not just within Asia, this is how much they finance in total every year, let alone what they ultimately might be willing to call Belt and Road investments at some point in time. So again, getting to a point where we're talking about financing on the scale of a trillion dollars under this initiative, while it's certainly plausible on the demand side, it's not at all clear that there's sort of a pool of capital that China in some way can direct that would get you there, even if you had the full participation of the MDBs. Now, in terms of these issues that I outlined, the debt risk, environmental impact, social impact, it is worth considering what exactly we mean by the problems when it comes to the Belt and Road approach and whatever exists as a policy framework coming from China when it comes to lending for Belt and Road projects, and then ultimately what do we mean by improving those? What would it look like to say that we're going to have MDB style standards in these areas? So let's start with the debt risk, and this is work that at the Center for Global Development we did last year, which simply tried to assess what would happen to the debt picture for all the countries borrowing under the Belt and Road initiative based on what their current debt profile is and their current level of debt risk is. So if we add some notional pipeline of Belt and Road projects into their overall stock of debt, what happens? And I would say as a starting point, for 65 or so countries, the vast majority of them really don't have significant debt risk. So the initiative itself, whether they might be borrowing a lot or a little, they probably have a fair degree of debt sustainability over time and not a lot to worry about. For a subgroup of countries, 20 to 25, they do appear to be more vulnerable and we have all of them on this chart. And then for a group of eight countries, which are highlighted in red here, they are already at very significant risk of debt distress. And then as you add some pipeline of Belt and Road projects to that debt load, they really are in an extreme state. This chart is useful because it has two dimensions to it. So you can see on the horizontal axis what is happening to overall debt loads for these countries and they move from their current state to some higher state as a result of Belt and Road projects. But then on the vertical axis, this is a concentration of China as a creditor. What happens? How dependent is the country on China as a source of credit? And you see some extreme cases here. Djibouti, which is often invoked in the media, that's for a good reason. If you look at these kind of data, Djibouti already today, but even more so if further Belt and Road projects proceed, is virtually entirely dependent on China for its external credits. Whether you owe debt vulnerable or not, that does not feel like a comfortable place to be for any sovereign. I would say beyond the work that we did, another important way to look at this is sort of trying to gauge what's going on in China's behavior as a creditor as it evaluates potential borrowers. So here, let me just talk to you very quickly through these two pictures. So if you look on the left at all low-income countries, and these are IMF data, I should say, you see a trend where it is still the case for low-income countries as a whole, they are very dependent on multilateral institutions. So again, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the IMF for a lot of these countries, but over time, the multilaterals are less important. There are other sources of financing, including commercial sources, and then China, which is the gray bar, is also increasingly prominent, but by no means a dominant creditor, it's all low-income countries. The much more important picture is on the right-hand side. So the IMF looks at a subgroup of countries that I would call the riskiest low-income countries. These are ones that went through major rounds of debt relief a number of years ago and are, as of today, back into major debt vulnerability. It is for these countries that the China picture looks very different, so that as of today or 2016, by this measure, China is the dominant source of credit. It's a relatively small group of countries in the scheme of things, but it says a lot about China's behavior and frankly raises questions about China's behavior as a creditor. It's not acting as a typical creditor, and I guess if nothing else, we would say that China has a higher risk tolerance overall in lending into an environment and environments that other creditors are not willing either to be present at all or to lend at the levels that China is lending. And that in my mind, again, thinking about the policy dimensions of the Belt and Road Initiative is a key vulnerability, certainly for the borrowing countries and those that are finding themselves in debt distress, but it's a vulnerability on the China side too for China as a creditor under this initiative. I mentioned in putting the trillions in context, the imperatives of the climate finance agenda, I think it's important to recognize at this stage of things, while the rhetoric is strong around the Green Belt and Road, the reality is not at all. This is not a Green Belt and Road. It is still in the energy sector an initiative that is mostly financing the traditional stuff, fossil fuels. It's not at all clear to me yet if that is going to evolve toward the rhetoric. I think there are reasons and I'll come to it very quickly around procurement issues that suggest to me that in fact, a key driver of the initiative itself is to employ the fossil fuel domestic assets within China so that even as China domestically becomes greener, its external footprint actually becomes dirtier. And I should say that these data come from World Resources Institute in Boston University. Finally, there's in the suite of what we would call project standards, some of which are environmental related, a lot of them are related to social dimensions, essentially things like if you're building a road through a community and you have to tear down houses, how do you treat those people? How do you compensate them fairly, give them fair notification, relocate them? What you see through the green checks on this matrix is that the multilateral institutions and some of the leading bilaterals like the Franchade Agency, AFD, JBIC tend to have pretty well evolved and robust standards around these things. It's not to say they always get it right and there certainly are any number of controversies around MDB projects over the years. But in contrast, if you look at the two leading Chinese policy bilateral lenders, China X and Bank and CDB, you see a lot of red Xs. They simply have not developed these standards to look like anything that we see from the multilateral institutions in what we might call best practice and that translates into very significant risks along all these dimensions at the project level and contributes to the broad backlash that China is now feeling on the overall initiative. Last point I would say and I offer this as a little bit of a hopeful note on where China might be going in the evolution of its approach is that Chinese policy makers do seem to care a lot about the multilateral character of this. As I said, going forward, I don't think it's just rhetoric. They've put a very high priority on their engagement with the World Bank around Belt and Road. Certainly it reputationally benefits them but I think it goes much deeper than that. They're very supportive of pretty granular and tough, I would say, analysis coming out of the bank on things like procurement policy, environmental standards. I think their support of that is a way to help them think through reform of their own bilateral lending institutions. If we just use one example, this question of procurement where the bilateral lenders, China Development Bank and China ACSIM, practice tied financing, as Samantha said, they aren't alone in this. Certainly export credit agencies around the world. This is their model. If USACSIM is gonna finance a deal in another country that's gonna involve a US firm. I think what sets China apart is that this defines their official financing across the board. It's not just the export credit agency and of course all this financing is operating at a scale that is unique in the world. No other bilateral operates at this level. So for China to be tying its financing to the use of Chinese firms has a real and distortive effect, I would say, on developing economies and on China's own behavior. Again, I think it affects the degree to which the initiative is not green. It is dirtier because the sources of financing have this obligation of employing domestic assets. What's the hopeful note? Well, if we consider what the alternative model would be, an MDB model that says procurement should be competitive. If the World Bank is gonna finance a project, they expect that that project will be open for bidding from any country. Under that model, Chinese firms do quite well. So in this picture we see that 39% of World Bank procurement is captured by Chinese firms. That suggests to me under any fair model that they are competitive and you compare that just to put it in context, as a lender, China accounts for 11% of the World Bank IBRD lending. So their firms are doing far in excess of what China's own lending would suggest they might be able to achieve. I think that's part of the story that can help the Chinese come around to reform in a way that they still see it as protecting Chinese interest, but better serves the development objectives of the initiative. Great, thank you very much, Scott. So now we're gonna turn to Fei Yu. And I wanna start with the headline that was just in Xinhua a few hours ago with the ADB president reaffirming that the ADB is willing to work with China and Chinese finance organizations on future BRI projects. So I'm curious to hear, Fei, how much collaboration, if any, has there been in the past between ADB and China on BRI projects? And what are some of the primary areas you see as potential areas of cooperation? Thank you, thank you for the question and thank you for USIP for the opportunity. This is a very important question I get. I will be speaking from the Asian Development Bank perspective, probably providing a more granular view of what actually happens, actually along the lines of what Scott has just mentioned. So in terms of our relationship with the BRI, so let's return to what is BRI. So the Belt and Road Initiative is an ambitious effort to improve regional cooperation and connectivity on a trans-colonial scale. So in terms of regional cooperation and connectivity, these are the objectives that we share with the BRI. So ADB has actually, in fact, supported regional cooperation for more than two decades, starting with the Greater Macon Sub-Regional Program and also later on the Central Asia Regional Economic Corporation Program, working with the Central Asian countries and the Southeast Asian countries. So because of this shared objective, so there is foundation for us to work with the BRI. So also as Scott mentioned, also there's some numbers on the screen. There is a lot of room for multiple players in terms of financing Asia's infrastructure needs. The estimate produced by the Asian Development Bank shows that between 2016 to 2030, we anticipate $26 trillion investment in Asia Pacific region is needed to provide infrastructure for sustainable development and how much is actually invested. So current investment is about 881 billion a year and the need translating into annual terms is about 1.7 trillion. So this is about less than 50% of the need is being met today. And as also Scott has already indicated, the ADB together with other multilateral development banks really account for quite a small percentage of the total investment needs when you look at these projections. So there is room for more players and the BRI by investing in infrastructure is providing a regional public good and which is also compatible with our goal to sustainable development in the region. So how do we work with the BRI in practice? So they actually in 2017, during the at the BRI forum, six MDBs or multilateral development banks signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Ministry of Finance. And this memorandum of understanding outlined some broad areas that the MDBs will work with the BRI. Just to give some examples, I will not outline all of them, but for example, infrastructure and connectivity projects are among the areas that the MDBs will collaborate with the BRI. Development financing mechanisms, which should, if successful, should address some of the debt issue concerns. And of course, also supporting SDGs and also the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. So when translating to project level, this basically means that we have to work based on our mandates. We have to work within our mandates and rules and policies. So if there is a BRI project that demonstrates that they will contribute to our goals for the Asia Pacific region and they comply with the requirements on our side in terms of financial, economic, financial safeguard due diligence. So we would work on these projects together with the BRI. As to how many projects we have done together, this is very hard to count because the, I think the common view is that it's very hard to count how many, which project is a BRI project to start with. So what has been used in practice basically is the investments in the BRI countries. So this is not the same thing. So it doesn't mean that investment happened in the BRI countries does not really mean that whatever standard you use, this is a BRI project. So I think there's some ambiguity on that. So it's kind of hard for us to count the specific, but the specific number of projects. But I think that all the regional corporation projects that we've undertaken under both the GMS program and also the CARIC program certainly would contribute to the same goal as the BRI. Thank you. So Faye, you're at the ADV which has been in the business of development for decades now. Can you give us a step-by-step picture of how ADV approaches development projects from start to finish and compare this model with how BRI projects are structured and implemented? Yeah, so I would like to now go into more specifics as to what exactly is different between MDBs and BRIs. So on the slide there is a project and a procurement cycle for ADB projects. This is quite a common concept and common, quite other MDBs follow a very similar process. They may have different names for documents and guidelines and procedures, but basically they are very much the same idea. So the project starts at a, there are several stages for project development. There's the programming stage together with pipeline development. So the programming stage at ADB is called country partnership strategy. So this is basically a platform for the ADB to work with the recipient country on what kind of priorities that we should follow in our operations in that country for four years. So it's on a four-year cycle. So how would the priorities be determined? One is we have our own strategy which is called strategy 2030 which defines our organization's views about how to meet Asia's infrastructure and other developmental needs. And in addition, so we of course would also consider the country's priorities. What do they think are the bottlenecks in development and which areas are most suitable for ADB to provide our assistance? So under the country partnership strategy, there is a dialogue involving governments, involving multiple government agencies. And also we extensively consult civil society NGOs. So it's not only a official government process but it's also widely where we try to involve as wide a scope of stakeholders as possible. So based on the country partnership strategy, there is a pipeline of projects that for three years is a rolling pipeline. The partnership strategy will come with a business plan which has a list of projects that we will finance. So let's stop here for and look at how the BRI might be undertaking this process. So for the BRI, it's not clear who is really the coordinating coordinator for the overall BRI initiative. So if you look at the organizations and stakeholders involved in the BRI program, you can easily name many. At the central level, so there's the traditional players, the Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Finance, the NDRC, National Development Reform Committee, and also there is the new agency which is supposed to probably provide some degree of coordination for China's International Aid, which is called the State International Development Corporation Agency, but this agency is very young. So it's just been established. So they do not really have the kind of practice and the institution that's built up like some place by an organization like the ADB over the past few, more than five decades of experience. So how are the projects determined for under the BRI, under the BRI initiative is there's no really official line or official statistics on how the process goes, but people believe that the belief is that this is not only a central government-driven process. There are also other stakeholders that are important players in the process, especially the SOEs, state-owned enterprises. These state-owned enterprises already have presence in a lot of the countries that the BRI has operations in. So these SOEs, they probably entered these countries as policy implementers during the early stage of China's foreign aid program probably in the 1990s. And then through their partnership and the relationship management, they can have some influence on policy decisions as well. And on the other hand, there are some decisions that appear to be totally driven at the highest level. So basically at the highest level, there are decisions made that certain projects are gonna be, are committed. So it's probably more of a two-way, it's opaque, but also it's quite a complicated process with probably some feedback. So because of this, it's hard to say that the BRI would be coordinated in terms of internally. They are not, so they are not that coordinated internally. Also externally, when they work with the governments, the needs of the governments are more or less only reflected by what the central government thinks in that country. So the other stakeholders are probably less, kind of left out from the picture. So the second process is project conceptualization and preparation. So during this process, this is when all these guidelines that Scott mentioned kicks in. So when we have a project, we have a number of policies that have been developed over, like I said, over the past five decades, in terms of managing social environmental impact and also public disclosure, transparency requirements and also very importantly, economic financial analysis. So we have guidelines for all of these, all of these processes. So this is actually from our website, Safeguard Policy Statement and Guidelines for the Economic Analysis of Projects. So we have developed a very detailed guidelines. Based on these guidelines, we can hire experts and our own staff who can just follow this step by step then they can provide a rigorous analysis of the project. So in terms of procurement, of course, we follow this open procurement, open and competitive procurement process which is the international norm. So in these two aspects, both social environmental and the procurement, China's BRI, we do not see a equivalent yet. Although there has been some announcements in terms of broad policy directions and plans. For example, in terms of environmental, environmental protection, just before the BRI Forum in 2017, the Chinese government outlined its own vision in the guidance on promoting a green belt and road. So this is published by foreign ministries including the NDRC, which is the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Environment and Ecology. So this is a very broad policy document. The Ministry of Environment and Ecology did provide a plan to implement some of these policy directions. But if you look at the plan, it's still very broad. Some of the directions are like comply with local environmental laws and regulations. So which these are should be goes without saying. So the fact that this goes into a policy document means that there's the practice on the ground is probably lacking in this regard. So but a more effective means maybe because there are multiple companies involved in the process, numerous companies actually involved in the process. It's hard to enforce these rules and regulations. One other initiative is for the banking sector to take this role. So they could as a condition for financing these projects because the BRI, both the SOEs and non-SOEs are very dependent on Chinese subsidized financing. So there is the Green Finance Committee of the China Society for Finance and Banking and London's Green Finance Initiative jointly published a set of Green Finance guidelines. So this is another effort trying to address the environmental concerns associated with the BRI program. So these financing standards can be adopted by China's policy banks. So the commercial banks, the commercial banks are not so much of a problem because a lot of the SOEs, including the commercial banks are publicly traded companies. So they have established rules and practices, including, for example, some most commercial banks operating overseas would have a country rating system. They would rate a country based on its financial risk. And what's the practice with the policy banks is unclear on this. This is still procurement, so I will stop there. But then after the project goes into implementation, first is a public bidding process for the ADB process. We have a public bidding and then the firm that is awarded contract would start implementing the projects. Once implementation starts, we still monitor the progress of this project. We have few visits to project sites at least once a year, sometimes if there are problems, more than once a year. So this ensures that the rules and the day agreements that we put in the project documents are actually implemented on the ground. So after the project is completed, we have a post-evaluation process that provides an independent, we have an independent evaluation group that provides an independent opinion in terms of how these projects have contributed to the goals that we started off with. And these would eventually also feed into the next country partnership strategy, guiding how we will be helping the countries in the future. Thank you very much, Fei. It's a very fascinating look inside how ADB does things. So we're gonna now turn to Pauline. And Pauline, I understand that, we're gonna look at the grassroots level now. So I understand that AFC works closely on the ground with local stakeholders and Chinese partners in countries where BRI investments are being made. So on a macro level, I wanna ask, what do you see as some of the benefits of BRI in Africa, which is the area that you specialize in, and what are some of the challenges for African countries? And then I wanna ask you to zoom in for us and talk about at the very grassroots, what are some of the biggest concerns and sources of conflict among the stakeholders that AFC works directly with? Good afternoon. And thank you so much. In my culture, when you say good afternoon to someone, they say good afternoon back to you. Good afternoon. Thank you. I was worried you went to bed, but glad we are all up. So I'm so happy to be participating in this panel. Patricia, thank you to you and to you for organizing this important conversation. And as I was sitting here, I was feeling relieved that my fellow panelists had the same concerns and the same analysis that we are hearing from the grassroots, and that gives me hope that whatever is going on at the grassroots is being addressed at the international level. So let me tell you a little bit about AFC. AFC is a peace-building organization which works on both sides of conflict. We work with civil society organizations and local communities to prepare them to engage the private sector. At the same time, we work with investors about peace and conflict resolution from a nonviolent perspective. So we prepare companies for dialogue by engaging them on the value of conflict sensitivity. At the same time, the concept of shared security is core to our work. Therefore, we recognize that neither communities nor investors can be secure unless projects are implemented and planned in Kohut or in line with the local communities and also taking the local community's needs and concerns into careful consideration. It doesn't always happen. Also, AFC adapts a peace-building approach to the engagement of regulators and policymakers and corporate stakeholders developing and mainstreaming tools and guidelines for conflict-sensitive business. We've been doing this both in China and also in countries where BRI operates. And sometimes it's not called BRI, but it is Chinese investments, especially in African countries. So when it comes to Africa, I want to begin by saying I'm African myself, I come from Kenya, and therefore we can see or we can acknowledge that China's engagement with Africa has had both positive things and negative things. African countries need help with building the infrastructure of their countries, especially things like roads, railways, hydropower, airports, and the likes, and some of them have already been mentioned. Also, we need better trade and investments where we can export our goods and import goods at a lower cost. Additionally, we need assistance on social and economic infrastructure. China seems to respond to these needs, although there have been other countries like the U.S., Europe, that have had relationship with Africa on these issues. However, at what cost does China's engagement come? And I'm not saying that China is worse than everybody else, because in Africa we've experienced colonialization, we have experienced new colonialization, we have experienced the issue of heavily indebtedness to a point that we can't even feed our own people. So China is not alone in this, but the phenomenon of the way China is investing in Africa is quite challenging and also promising at the same time. So there are issues that we're asking ourselves as Africans, what are the long-term environmental and socioeconomic impacts of this relationship? Are African countries able to repay their debt to China? Or do we go through another new colonialization process? For example, Kenya's debt to China makes 70% of all bilateral debt. Kenya has become more indebted in the relationship with China. What about the health of our people? Cheap and regulated products coming from China, who will protect our people? I want to give you an example. Recently, the Kenyan government decided to stop fish, contaminated fish coming from China. The following day, China said, if you're going to stop this, then you have to pay our money, you have to pay our debt. And the third day, the government of Kenya rescinded that. So you ask yourself, who will protect the people of Africa? What about racism? Are we to accept being dehumanized in the name of aid, investments, or trade? There have been incidences where some of the Chinese companies' managers will call Africans monkeys. There have been some incidences where they've been whipped and where they've actually been called so many other things. And in Kenya, there was an upro when that happened, but the international community wasn't aware that that was happening. The other thing that we are concerned about is the issue of gender. When Chinese companies send workers to Africa, they're sending predominantly male managers and male workers. In the continent, we are trying to overcome gender discrimination, especially in the work environment. These Chinese companies are not taking that into consideration. So that's a challenge for us. Of course, there are so many challenges that I can mention. I don't know whether I should go to challenges now. Okay, so I will go to challenges. No, before I go to challenges, let me give you examples of our real work, especially in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, the FSC office there has been working with local civil society organizations to prepare or organize meetings that educate local communities on the impact of Chinese investments in Zimbabwe and other African countries. Therefore, we've organized already two delegations that brought together people from Swazilander, from Kenya, from Uganda, from Zambia to talk about the impact of Chinese investments. At the same time, we bring Chinese investors, Chinese scholars or academia to Africa to dialogue with these communities so that they can see how their investments are having impact in Africa. At the same time, we take our experts to China to go and talk to the investors to educate them about sensitivity of working in our communities. And we can talk a little bit about that. Second, the second example I want to give you is another one that happened in Myanmar. And this is a success story. It wasn't only by the AFSC, but it was in collaboration with other partners in Myanmar. There was a huge dam that was going to be built in, it was called the Mietnon Dam. And it was going to be the fifth largest dam in the world. And this dam was going to displace 18,000 people or 18,000 families. And at the same time, it was going to affect 50 villages that lived around that area. So when people started hearing about the project, they looked at the impact of the project on their environment, on their livelihood, themselves being displaced. And the fact that the hydropower that was going to be generated was going to be sent to China and not benefit the local community. Of course, the people got angry and there was conflict between the government and the people in Myanmar. So AFSC, working with the local community and other agencies, started having dialogues. But it was hard because of the sensitivities of the government of Myanmar. You can't just start criticizing or start organizing. You have to find ways of doing it that allows you to talk to the community and talk to the policymakers at the same time. So through the help of one local person, we found out about art exhibition. And using art exhibition, we were able, or AFSC and local partners, were able to bring awareness to the community but mainly to get the community's voices heard. We were working both in Myanmar but also in China talking to the company that was investing in China. Through that conversation and trying to resolve conflict in a nonviolent situation, the community became more emboldened and became more vocal about what was happening to them. In the end, the government canceled the project. The project is pending. We don't know whether the project will be revived again. It's possible that it would be revived again. But today, we believe that the dialogue between the community, between the government and between the investors was able to bring some understanding that this project cannot happen without consideration of the needs of the local community. So what are some of the challenges that we are facing? One has already been mentioned and that is lack of transparency by local governments about Chinese investments in their countries. It's not just China that's not transparent but governments where they are investing are not transparent either. So that makes it very hard to protect the rights of local communities and the environment. You don't know how much money is coming in. You don't know who is receiving this money. You don't know how you as a community can benefit. Even though you can see a road that has been built, you don't know how much money was spent on that road. You don't know how much money went into the pockets of the policy makers because of corruption in the continent. And of course, you can say, oh yeah, now we can travel back and forth between Mombasa using the railroad. But what you don't know is that the trains that are being used now were used in the 1950s in China. So we are happy that we have trains but what does that say about justice? And if we believe in justice, what does that say? And now we owe China so much that in my generation, we will not be able to come out of debt in Kenya. Second, lack of political will from governments who enjoy the see no evil and hear no evil stance of Chinese in their investment deals. Human rights issues are relegated to the back and compounding this issue is China's relationship with the elites in these countries and little to do with the local communities. No matter how hard we try, it's extremely hard for us to establish connections or the local communities to establish connection and relationship with hard to reach actors such as the governments, policy makers and of course the investors themselves. When they are sitting at the tables, local communities are not there. Right now they are in Beijing or outside of Beijing. How many local communities are present? You know, I bet you none. So we have also seen that it's becoming more and more challenging when the civil society space is restricted because the civil society groups cannot advocate for the communities as much as they want. There is repercussions from governments such as in Zimbabwe, you know, in Myanmar, in Cambodia, in other countries around the world where BRI operates. For the jury on the long-term impact of China's BRI on the environment is still out. There are some indications that the projects do not always follow regulations or the governments are willing to turn a blind eye due to corruption. A huge question remains about poor countries' dependency on China's engagement. It's been asked again and again, are our governments mortgaging our future? You know, by giving China unlimited access to their markets, natural resources and land. You know, I just gave you the Kenyans incident fiasco. But there is even more. The rate at which China is accessing natural resources in places like Zimbabwe, in other places, DRC, Angola, and others is alarming. You know, both for the environment but also for the benefit of the local people themselves. You know, most of the times, local communities do not benefit from that extraction. As I said before, increase of restricted places in countries such as China and in other places are making it more and more difficult, especially for China for us as an organization. We, before we were having more access to work with policymakers, to work with the academia, to send people back and forth to China and Africa. Now, after the overseas NGO loan, it became very challenging, you know, to execute programs both in China and also BRI countries. And of course, one of the other challenges we are facing is worsening negative perceptions of Chinese foreign investments. In some places, people are willing to go to war to protect their environment. You know, when the SGR railway was being built through Kenya, you know, there were communities that were ready to go to war but through their dialogue that was halted. So there hasn't been a proper establishment of how the BRI projects are implemented in conversations with the communities that are affected. And that's a big challenge. Thank you. Thank you very much, Pauline. You've certainly given us a lot to think about. I want to quickly open it up to questions. We only have 15 minutes left. So if you can keep your questions brief and limit yourself to one, that would be great. And we have mics. So starting right here, please. Good afternoon. I'm Mark David Miller. I used to be heavily involved in the Kyrgyz market. My question is for Feiyu. Is there a published BRI country strategy subject to public comments just like EBRD and Asian Development Bank and the other multilaterals publish what their proposed country strategy is in advance, offer it up for public comments, and usually get some pretty good responses from NGOs and other people who are interested in the area. But I was curious if the BRI has the same. Thank you for the question. This actually gets into some of the issues that we talked about earlier. At least I'm not aware of, for example, in Kyrgyz and whether China's BRI has a engagement strategy there. So a lot of the decisions were published. Your published engagement strategy. So the BRI does have a broad principles for the entire BRI program, which is published. And the official position on that has always been that the platform is open and they welcome partners, they welcome countries. But in practice, how this has happened is not clear. Hi there. My name is Paul Johnson. My question was about the BRI focus on the Lucifer countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Angola. I know at one point Angola was the largest trade partner or beneficiary of financing with China, but also with Mozambique in particular with the devastation to the infrastructure. And there seems to be a lot of focus here on China with Africa with respect to the great competition game. But I'm just interested in BRA, China, and the Lucifer countries if there's a particular strategy on China's end. Thank you for your question, Paul. So I haven't looked in incredible depth in the Lucifer countries. So your question, as I understand it, is there a strategy that China has? I think what I have observed across Sub-Saharan Africa would be that China is heavily investing in Africa. It's definitely a growing region of interest. If you look historically, China didn't initially focus on Africa at all, but the major growth in its investments is pivoting towards Africa substantially. If you look at the profile of investments, Sub-Saharan Africa overall has a higher share of the more concessional lending than other regions do. But you still see a lot of the less concessional focus there. One of the things that we've observed across Sub-Saharan Africa is that we've done some analysis of where investments are going below the national level, and we've seen a high propensity for Chinese investments to actually be directed to the home regions of national leaders. So I think the corruption piece that Pauline mentioned before is an issue, but I think that's all I can really say in terms of Lucifer specifically. But I think you also have to understand that for Angola, for example, the major interest of China was oil. And they came to a point where they almost had a monopoly on oil in Angola. And China in Mozambique, they became, again, indebted, very, very badly after they had struggled to almost get out. So the investments were good because they built schools, they built roads, they built airports, they built railways, and then what? The indebtedness, then when you look at the benefits of selling all your oil or losing, selling power of your oil to a particular country and a few schools and roads. So it's a big challenge. Thanks. Hi, I'm Nick Foster from USAID. I'm wondering if you could comment on this Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance, MCDF, which is a new organization that the Chinese suggested for connecting international donor organizations, et cetera, and what the stance was from the ADP on that and what the panel feels about this organization at large. Thanks. Yes, thank you for the question. This is an ongoing effort between the MDBs and the BRI. So we are working with the BRI to improve the quality and transparency of infrastructure and connectivity investment. That's what this center is tasked to do. And actually, this center was also part of the scope of collaboration mentioned in the previous MOU, the Memorandum of Understanding in 2017. So China has shown a lot of willingness to work with the MDBs and improve their practices, which I think it's a good thing for them as well, because their projects, if they're not sustainable in terms of social environmental protection and also in terms of debt, this would come as a loss for China as well. And China right now is spending, is focusing on deleveraging its economy and managing financial risks. So this also fits in with the broader economic management strategy and policy of the country. Austin Dohler, Center for European Policy Analysis. My question is one of what Samantha said, how China is trying to do this new marketing PR strategy. How much can we expect to see actual behavioral changes and how much can we expect to just be good PR campaigns but no real changes? And kind of to what Scott said, for example, how we said how Chinese firms, when I think you said 39% of World Bank bidding processes when they're open, but why would we expect China to open up the PR bidding processes if it could expect to lose maybe 60% of the contracts? Thank you. I think progress on this stuff will be hard. I think the issues are well identified at this point and even acknowledged to some degree by Chinese officials. Certainly they're saying good things on debt sustainability as of today. But for the initiative itself, one thing I think it's important to recognize, I don't think it ever promised change. I think it promised a lot of money to invest in infrastructure. And the change is now a reaction by Chinese officials to the reaction that the world has had to the initiative. I also, the other one I would make is, so when we did our work on the debt issues around Belt and Road, we decided to use the initiative itself frankly as a hook because there was a lot of immediate tension. It was also a useful way to constrain how many countries we had to look at. I think going forward and certainly in our work, it's less important to be hyper focused on this thing called Belt and Road than it is to look at the underlying actors and their policies and behavior. And now ultimately maybe because Belt and Road is an important political initiative, it will drive change in behavior by the policy banks, by SOEs. But until we see signs of that, I think it's far more important to focus on the behavior of those institutions as they engage in other countries. Yeah, great question, Austin. So building off of that, I use the term marketing strategy purposefully for similar reasons to what Scott was saying that I think there's a lot of rhetoric. I'd be curious, one of my dream projects to tackle possibly this year or next is to actually historically try to tag BRI-like projects to see whether actual investment strategy from China has really changed before and after the launch of BRI or is it just really effective marketing? And the reason I'm interested in that is because there are so many instances of projects that pre-existed BRI that have been grandfathered in and now they are a BRI project. In terms of change, so I agree with what Scott was saying that I think China is trying to catch up and tweak its marketing strategy because with this greater visibility there's been more scrutiny and with the scrutiny there's been more criticism. I think that it is somewhat in China's interest to make some course corrections, partly because one of the stated objectives that they have for BRI is reputational gains. They wanna be seen as a global leader. They wanna be seen as a responsible partner. If BRI gets tinged or tarnished in some way as the vehicle that brought debt distress or the vehicle that is making it difficult for countries to be able to feed their own people because they're financing these debt burdens, that's problematic for China. It's also problematic for China if they continue to lend it a scale that countries are having trouble repaying their loans because we're now at the point where we're starting to see some domestic criticism from within China about citizens saying, why are you spending so much overseas when we have underdeveloped regions at home? And I think there's greater, with that greater scrutiny is greater pressure for China to demonstrate economic returns. It can't do that if it's lending irresponsibly and people are having a hard time paying back. We just have a few minutes left. I'm gonna collect the three questions that were back here and then allow the panelists to answer the questions they wanna answer and wrap up if you have any final, brief thoughts. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Lars Benson, Center for International Private Enterprise. Has anybody started to take a look at sort of, people refer to this, the social, the environmental, and sort of the economic impacts? From the economic impacts, it's mostly what are the benefits either provided in increased growth, economic growth, or what are the local benefits in terms of countries? Has anybody really taken a look collectively at pre-projects to see how they might correspond with the MDBs, for example? Next, behind them, please. Hi, I'm Anthony Volk from the Institute for State Effectiveness, and I wanted to ask actually about the more soft power elements of BRI. So I was in Ethiopia a year ago and the Ethiopians I spoke with said how China was a neocolonialist and this rail that they built in Addis Ababa was basically a new form of power. Especially on the ground, what is the sort of perspective from individuals who are affected by BRI projects? Did they view China as sort of as granting this new economic gain or is it viewed more as neocolonialism? Is there a mix of views? And not only the projects themselves but also Chinese efforts at spreading media, especially in Southeast Asia, things like that. All right, and final question in the back. Hi, my name is Chen Yang from GWU. Personally, I believe that China remains indebted to the African countries in terms of how it regained its UN seat. So perhaps that's why China is making investment, but I wonder how that investment is being received in general in Africa. All right, thank you. So feel free to answer whichever question you'd like to answer or if you have final concluding thoughts and then we'll wrap it up. Wow. Which there was more time because I think in the African context and I'm not claiming to speak for the whole of Africa but at least where AFSC operates, we hear both attitudes. People are grateful that they have a new road. They are grateful that the airport has been rebuilt. They are grateful that something else has been built. But people are also anxious because really they don't know the long-term impacts of these investments. And then they can see that what China is taking out of Africa is more than what Africa is receiving. So I think that there is a question there. You know, if we give them access to all our natural resources, what do we get in return or what do we keep for future generations in our continent? And unfortunately, very this most of these communities that are asking these questions don't have a platform or don't have recourse for the grievances because China or Chinese companies operate with the policymakers and the elites in the country and in some cases, very corrupt leaders. You know, so it's not so much about, you know, us having an opportunity to talk about how this is impacting us but not even having access or not knowing even when those conversations are happening. You just see something new has come up. You see a new Africa Union. You don't know whether they are listening devices. You know, and then you see them voting. But the voting issue is not, it's not unique to China. You know, I have witnessed it working at United Nations, even the US, you know, Britain, European Union, these are poor countries have to vote in line with these countries if they want a loan or if they want aid from these countries. So it's not unique to China in any way. So let me give one, oops. Oh. I'm sorry. Okay, that's okay. We have another panel. That's okay, no worries. Okay. Very briefly, yeah. So first I want to emphasize is that we should realize that BRIA is young. It's six years old as of today. So a lot of the institutions that we talked about, for example, ours is 50 plus. So it takes time to develop the institution. It takes time to develop policy and regulations. And so from what we have seen, we have seen some positive developments in terms of trying to move towards international standards, especially in terms of social environmental, management of social environmental risks. How they will do this, it's very challenging. The second point is that we need to understand that the picture is very complex. There are central players at the central level and there are players at SOEs and non-SOEs, small, medium enterprises. So they are not necessarily gonna listen to the national government in a lot of cases. So this is gonna be a long and complicated process. Whether there has been a systematic evaluation of BRI's benefit to these countries, the World Bank actually conducted a study. I think the finding was that, to give an example, the BRI investment in transportation linkages have reduced travel time by 12%, which translates into real benefits in terms of facilitating trade and movement of people. I mean, on defining success at the project level, sort of economic, social welfare measures, it's actually harder to do than it feels like it should be, even for institutions like the ADB, have been trying to do it for decades. The only other thing I would say about it is, there's an, I would say, equally important aspect. So that's sort of ex-post. So how do we know if this project's seeded? There's equally important as the ex-ante, going into it, do we think this project has a good level of achieving some success? And I say that because I just finished a look at the Laos Railway project and I can't find a way to decide for myself whether this was a good idea for the country of Laos. I think it actually, the regional railway makes a lot of sense, it clearly will generate high economic returns overall, but it's very hard to see that Laos will be capturing a level of those returns that justify the level of borrowing that it will have to do to build the railway within its country. And that's sort of, that's an ex-ante kind of process. And there's no evidence, frankly, that that process unfolded in a way that would give me confidence that the decision-making was sound. All right, all good questions. I think, Anthony, I will get yours because yours is the remaining one. So soft power elements. So I'll share one quick anecdote from Uzbekistan. Sorry, I keep talking about Uzbekistan. I just came back from there, so it's fresh in my mind. But I think it's, I've seen it in other places as well. So there's definitely mixed feelings on the ground. On the one hand, you talk to people and they say that China is such a big actor, they have ready capital, they are highly motivated. And so it can be a galvanizing force to get things done that wouldn't otherwise happen. And an example that people gave was one of the earliest transport linkages that connected a lot of parts of Central Asia. And there was a sense that, this wouldn't have happened without Chinese capital and China going around and actually trying to get all of these different countries' leaders together to actually make this happen. And so there's definitely appreciation. On the flip side, some of these same people are saying, listen, post-independence is still relatively a near thing for us. We've been there, done that with Russia. We don't want China to become the new Russia. Some of the language that they used actually in interviews with me was kind of reflective of, we don't want to become a vassal state, we don't want to become dependent. And so I think there's a sense that we want to hedge our bets. And I think globally, we've done some work at looking at popular opinion with regard to Chinese investment. We do see a relationship kind of at a broad level that the more of Chinese investment that a country tends to receive, it's associated with people viewing China as more influential, viewing that influence as positive and seeing China's development model as one to aspire to. But there are exceptions to that. And on the information media piece, come see me afterwards. I'm starting a new study right now on that. That's coming out this year. So happy to connect with you. Thank you. Great. Would you please join me in a round of applause for Pauline, Faye, Scott, and Samantha. We're gonna have a brief five minute coffee break and we'll come back for the second panel. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, we went over a bit. It's hard to... I think we could just cut the coffee break. Yeah. Begin the next panel in just a minute or so. There's the thing. Yeah, so it's okay. Yeah. The next screen is all blood, so far. Yeah. I saw them over there. Yeah. Was it good? Good afternoon, everyone. We'll just go ahead and get started so that we have as much time as possible to hear from our panelists. Thanks to everyone for coming, for sticking with us through the break. My name is Jake Stokes. I'm a senior policy analyst here in the China program at USIP. Delighted to be serving as the moderator for the second panel today. Basically, the goal of this panel is to gain a better understanding of how China's Belt and Road Initiative is playing out on the ground, and especially as it relates to the peace and conflict intersection. So that's really what we'll focus on today. I'll start off with a quick word about panel format. We have about 90 minutes, so we'll spend the first hour or so talking among the panelists. Each panelist will provide an overview of how BRI is playing out in their region, and then we'll have a discussion amongst ourselves, and then afterwards, we'll spend the last 30 minutes or so taking questions from the audience. So please be thinking of your questions as we go along. Now, let me introduce the distinguished panel we've brought together today. I'm really excited to have them all here. I'll just do brief introductions so that we can start the discussion. We're a little behind on time. The full bios are all listed online, and they've all done lots and lots of great things. It would take me all day to go through them all. So let me just start immediately to my left here. Andrew Small. Andrew is a senior transatlantic fellow with the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund. It's a program he founded in 2006. He's written extensively about Belt and Road issues, especially in South Asia, and he's the author of the indispensable book The China-Pakistan Axis, Asia's New Geopolitics. Andrew will discuss how Belt and Road Initiative is playing out in South Asia. Next we'll have Paul Nantouya, Paul's a research associate at the Africa Center for Security Studies, where he focuses on African security issues and China's role in Africa. Prior to joining the center, Paul held positions with Catholic Relief Services in Sudan and the South Africa-based Africa Center for Constructive Resolution of Disputes. He also has extensive experience working on a range of peace processes across Africa, and he will discuss how BRI is unfolding on the continent. Next, joining us from Burma by a video chat at a very, very late hour, so thank you, is Kin Kin Cha Chi. She's the lead researcher, or a lead researcher, at the Institute for Strategy and Policy Myanmar. It's a relatively new think tank in Yangon that's already one of the country's leading research institutions. Kin has written several reports on China's role in Myanmar and the impact of Belt and Road investments, which USIP has been proud to support. In addition, she has a forthcoming paper that we will publish here at USIP on the China-Myanmar Economic Quarter, or CMEC, Kin will provide insights on Burma's experience with BRI. Last but not least, on my far left, we have Brian Harding. Brian serves as the Deputy Director and Fellow of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington. Prior to joining CSIS, Brian was Director for East and Southeast Asia Policy at the Center for American Progress, and previously he served in the Office of Secretary of Defense in the Policy Office as a Country Director for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, and he will talk about the parts of Southeast Asia that are not Burma. So I'll just go ahead and get it started. Each panelist will do an overview. For the overviews, I've asked each of them to respond to a few framing questions, and basically they can be boiled down to two things. One is BRI a force for stability in your region, or is it driving conflict? And two, where are local experiences diverging from either Chinese or Western narratives about BRI? So let me start off with Andrew to give us an overview of how BRI is affecting dynamics in South Asia. Okay, thanks very much, Dakin. Thanks for the chance for joining this session today. I'm gonna focus most of the comments, not on South Asia as a whole, but particularly on Pakistan and the Maldives, partly because I think with regard to the second question, I think more new things have been going on there, and I think some of the other developments in terms of India's pushback, what played out in Sri Lanka, some of these other cases are perhaps a little more familiar. So I want to spend most of the time on those two case studies. So the first case that I want to talk about is the kind of stock take now on CPEC several years in. And CPEC is, of course, interesting in several respects because it was the BRI's flagship as dubbed by the Chinese side as well as Pakistanis, one of the largest sets of projects agreed under the auspices of the BRI and actually quite a lot of it really moving ahead on the ground. It hasn't just been a bunch of MOUs. There's been real on the ground projects that one can monitor and see how they're playing out. And I think there's now, at this juncture, we can kind of make an assessment of where it's got to and where it's headed in a way that perhaps even a year or two ago it was a lot more difficult to ascertain what was going on. I think what was it understood to be? It was understood to be a package that added up initially 28 billion, then 46 billion, then you have figures thrown around of 62 billion, some even claiming figures above $100 billion worth of projects, mostly energy, Guadar in kind of smaller overall sum. Can you remind us what Guadar is? Guadar port in Baluchistan, the sort of endpoint of the geographical connections from Xinjiang to the Indian Ocean and the kind of redevelopment of the port, the airport and some of the other facilities there. Some road development around Pakistan, some rail projects, fiber optic cabling, and then this was kind of the first phase, was then supposed to move into industrial development, special economic zones and various things in the second phase, and then a very expansive array of things in the long-term plan, agriculture, tourism, a whole array of different things. What have we actually seen? I mean, essentially, CPEC has kind of topped out for now in terms of the infrastructure projects that are happening. It topped out probably around November 2017, which was the last point in which you had these very, very large packages still in some sense under negotiation between the two sides. If we're looking at the overall size of CPEC now and the prospective size of CPEC, we're talking about around $19 billion now and the projects that are still under negotiation in CPEC, there are no, there's one or two large infrastructure projects that the two sides are still talking about, ML1 railway line from Karachi to Peshawar, possibly Karachi light rail, but pretty much the major infrastructure projects are done. Most of the things that compose those larger figures are no longer being talked about. And why has CPEC kind of topped out at this level and kind of what happens next? I mean, some of the reasons certainly relate to the economic conditions. In Pakistan, I think, by around late 2017, the various economic crises that we're now seeing playing out more seriously, in Pakistan we're already starting to become evident balance of payments crisis that's been going on and slightly abated, fiscal crisis, inflation issues and significantly lower growth projections that we're now seeing. I think it became clear to both sides that the capacity of the country to actually bear CPEC on the scale that was originally envisaged and lots of the bigger projects under negotiation was just increasingly difficult. But you have also had, I think, more quietly in Pakistan than in some other places, though every now and then with this new government you have heard some of this coming directly from the ministers. You have seen some of the same kinds of political pushback in Pakistan that you've seen elsewhere. Malaysia, Maldives, a number of other cases too, for pretty much the same set of reasons. Complaints about benefits for Pakistani business. Complaints about politicization of projects. Complaints about corruption. Complaints about contract terms. All of the usual sorts of things that we've heard elsewhere too. But I think you've also had a degree of skepticism about, on China's part as well, about the new government that took office, the PTI under Imran Khan, which took office last year. You had an agenda for the previous government was very closely aligned with the Belt and Road. The new government's agenda is very differently composed in terms of the kind of economic focal points and the level of prioritization of the relationship with China. So this week, Imran Khan is in Beijing for his second visit. The next phase to quote one official on the Chinese side has essentially moved from mega projects to peanut projects. And what that is in practice amounts to is, yes, the special economic zones are moving ahead on a pretty small scale. Guadal, which had lagged very significantly behind on plans. There's an attempt to push that forward in the next stretch. And you have these new socio-economic cooperation projects that are taking place. In other words, aid. China's new development agency is looking at using Pakistan as kind of a test case. I mean, it's very underdeveloped, the development agency so far. I think Pakistan is intended as a kind of experimental case but none of this adds up, I think, now in the next few years through the kind of transformative vision, CPAC has game changer. And that has kind of advantages and disadvantages politically, geopolitically, economically. In practice, when you, for all the kind of debt trap questions with respect to Pakistan, probably topping out at this level means that the level of debt involved relating to CPAC. Yes, there are some additional liabilities involved in the energy projects. But it doesn't look like it's at a particularly unmanageable level if it's 19 billion, low 20s rather than the 46, 62 kind of version of this. So there are some advantages there. I think there are some benefits when it comes to the kind of regional stability question. CPAC was really embedded in a broader attempt to upgrade the China-Pakistan relationship in a way that was clearly eliciting some of the level of pushback that you've seen from India. There was a view on China's part that you could try and decouple the China-Pakistan and China-India relationships in a way that they hadn't really tried to do before, which included much less sensitivity to Indian concerns about the kinds of investments and the scale of what was being undertaken with Pakistan, which in practice proved too difficult to sustain. And I think as a political context, the kind of post-Wuhan stabilization efforts between the two sides have translated into the mindset that I think China is approaching the China-Pakistan relationship. It's much more discreet, much more low key than what you saw playing out in the last couple of years. I think the challenge for China is, one talks about the strategic goals that China had with CPAC. One version of the strategic goals was, on some accounts, a military-centered thing. Can Guadal be upgraded? Can you have links to the Indian Ocean? I think whether that was really the intention or not is debatable. If it was the intention, Guadal has lagged behind. It does need to be transformed commercially before it can be really viable militarily. I still don't think Guadal is likely to be a particularly significant naval focal point despite the claims to that effect. I think what China did want to do, though, was, in Pakistan's case, which is not true in a lot of other countries, bolster the country economically, give it the economic resources that it would need to be able to sustain all the other benefits of what it described as kind of comprehensive balancing in the region, not just military. It thought that Pakistan need to be more focused on economics as a source of national power, all of these sorts of things, even down to the capacity to sustain military budgets. That's clearly not going to happen. CPAC's not going to achieve that kind of major strategic bolstering effect that you'd seen. And lastly on Pakistan, I think there was a period in which China-Pakistan relationship operated in a way that was incredibly insulated from politics in Pakistan. It had a sort of sacrosanct status. The all-weather friend. China is the reliable security partner. The security relationship is still strong, still continues on its own track, but China has become much more embroiled in Pakistani politics, criticism in public opinion, all of these sorts of things than it ever really was before. And it's absolutely not been clear that this is strategically advantageous to China when it comes to sustaining the broader goals that it has with Pakistan and its position in the region. Much, much more briefly on the Maldives. I think the Maldives is a very interesting case as well, and particularly because of the contrast with what's playing out in the Maldives now after the election of a new government versus what happened with Sri Lanka several years ago. And there are many similarities between the two elections that took place. You've basically had governments coming to power in both countries that were very critical of Chinese investments, looking to renegotiate terms, very critical of corruption in the contracts in both cases and significantly backed in opposition by India. And then in both cases, facing a serious economic crisis after taking office that was heavily related to the Chinese investments and the country's fiscal position. Sri Lanka, of course, was famously left pretty much to fend for itself. China was very tough on enforcing the terms of contracts, which had a number of kind of penal clauses and things in them. And of course, the Hanban-Tota deal and everything that ensued from that played out in that framework. The Maldives case has been strikingly different partly because of the external conditions that relate to the level of support they've been given. India and the Gulf States kind of encouraged by India have swung in to ensure that the new government is not facing the kind of economic pressures that it expected to be facing when it went into the elections, which has given considerable breathing room leading through to the parliamentary elections, which just took place, which was a huge victory for the MDP. And also strengthening, of course, the government's hand when it comes to negotiations with China. Most of these have yet to kick off really seriously. I think that will get going quite soon. But China itself, in the exchanges that have been with the Maldives since the election, has, by contrast with the Sri Lankan case, shown itself much more open to negotiation on contract terms, loans, all of these other things, even the acceptance of the fact that a number of these contracts did have corruption deeply embedded in them. Where these negotiations go, we will see in the coming months. But it's, I think, a fairly striking success story when it comes to a kind of democratic rebalancing in the region in a context that could have really been problematically colored by an economically induced economic crisis to see the contrast between these two cases. I think clearly the general adjustment that was also talked about in the first panel is still really a work in progress. You see that in both of these places as well. I didn't see any progress on meaningful transparency when it comes to CPEC. In some respects, the fact that you have a more competitive environment means there's even greater sensitivity to embarrassment about the projects. All the Pakistani ministers are being told to shut up and to a certain extent adhering to that now. There are areas where this adjustment is not taking place, but you can see, as I think people highlighted, how far some of the kind of pushback that's been playing out in some of these countries is now translating in practical terms to a BRI that is somewhat slimmed down, somewhat more adaptive to local preferences. In some respects, I think probably more sustainable as well. Great, thank you, Andrew. That was really interesting. Let me turn to Paul next, and then just so King Ken knows that I'll turn to her after Paul. So over to you, Paul. Thank you. Thank you, Jacob. And it's really, it's great to be here. Very important and very timely, very well timed discussion concerning the summit that has just started today. I think I'll start with sort of an out-of-the-box proposition, namely that the One Belt One Road is not a new, it's not a new idea, it's not, it's certainly much older than six years. I mean, we can take this discussion all the way down to the administration of Jiang Zemin. And this is when the Chinese government really started thinking very seriously about reviving the ancient Silk Road that was established during the dynastic era. And the discussions within the Communist Party of China at the time was rebuilding this Silk Road, this ancient Silk Road, would be, would do two things. One, it would symbolize China's return to a position of global preeminence to its rightful place in global affairs. And the logic went that the power of dynastic China, of imperial China, was at its height when the ancient Silk Road had been extended essentially to its fullest extent. So that was sort of the strategic logic. And efforts were made to begin rebuilding this road, initially in China's neighborhood. But the effort has accelerated tremendously under President Xi Jinping and sort of he's been able to get a lot of, essentially to focus the party and the government towards achieving this objective as part of the overall effort for China to essentially reclaim its position of global preeminence. So that's where I wanted to start out, you know, to basically focus on the larger strategic logic and to kind of tap into the strategic psychology of China's leaders. Now, in terms of the African continent, we've seen a lot of that from a soft power perspective as well as from a narrative, as well as a rhetorical policy perspective. The Chinese government, Chinese diplomats, Chinese leaders, Chinese academics close to the government have really sort of revived and invoked the voyages of Jiang He who established trading centers in Mombasa, in Malindi, in Lamu. Actually, when you go to Mombasa today, which is where the Standard Gauge Railway begins, you'll find a large statue of Jiang He and essentially the Chinese government has really, really tried very hard to kind of use this as a symbolic sort of outward expression of China coming back to the African continent and rebuilding the maritime silk road along the ancient silk road. So that has been a very important political narrative that the Chinese government has tried to propagate on the continent. In terms of how the One Belt, One Road is playing out on the continent, one really sees the strategic elements much more clearly on the African continent, perhaps more than in other regions, because you begin to see a mix of commercial, security, military, economic, as well as people to people, of course, the five connectivities of the Belt and Road. You see these at play on the continent. Of course, the African continent hosts China's only overseas military base, which was established two years after a new national security law was passed that allows for the overseas deployment of China's security forces. So we saw this in Djibouti, because essentially that base, the beginning, it all started with the construction of a civilian port, civilian port infrastructure. This is where the essentially, the building blocks for the naval facility began. And we've kind of seen this discussion in other countries. There's been a lot of speculation about other potential facilities that might be established in other African countries. So I just wanted to start with that larger strategic framing. In terms of whether one Belt, one Road, is a force for stability, there are positives and negatives. And I think it's important to recognize that this initiative is still evolving. And sort of to go back to the dictum closely associated with the Dengzioping, you're traveling through a river while feeling the stones. And we see China's leaders constantly invoking that. So we see both elements, certainly on the security front. At the policy level, the One Belt, One Road was formally incorporated into the Africa-China Strategic Policy Framework at last year's Fokak Summit. This is where its broad outlines are clearly fleshed out. We also see it in the 2019 to 2021 China-Africa Action Plan, which has a lot of security elements to it. The China-Africa Policy Paper that came out in 2015, which is quite explicit in, it makes the argument that this, the Chinese dream, the drive towards national rejuvenation is similar to Africa's 2063 vision of the African Union. So there are elements that are clearly spelt out. The 2017 vision of maritime cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, which sort of fleshes out the security dimensions of the Belt and Road, has also featured quite heavily in many of the security agreements that the People's Republic of China has signed with a number of African countries, especially after the Fokak Summit. The other element is the Beijing's increased presence in Africa's maritime space. And we've seen Chinese state-backed firms involved in roughly 14 port projects, from Kenya to Sudan and Mauritania, which is one cluster, Senegal to South Tomé and Príncipe, Cameroon to Angola, Namibia and Mozambique, and Tanzania all the way back to Kenya. So we see the maritime Silk Road has been extended, has been extended from East Africa, sort of crossing west. And if one looks at the division for maritime cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, it very clearly spells out a number of issues. One is the building of regional shipping centers, the establishment of sister ports and port alliances, which are all seen as building blocks for establishing new patterns of global trade, reducing China's dependence on sea lanes outside its control, its immediate control, and protecting maritime rights and interests, which is something that features heavily now in Chinese documents. Now, from an African perspective, China's latest maritime push, sort of the narrative on the continent, certainly with the governments, is that it will improve Africa's logistical efficiency, export capabilities, as well as regional trade. And the Chinese government, for its part, has been very keen to demonstrate its sensitivity to assisting the African continent to improve its economic competitiveness in addition to achieving Beijing's sort of larger objectives. Peacekeeping and peace support operations is the other area that Beijing has kind of, we've seen alongside the expansion of the Belt and Road Program or strategy, there's been an increased focus and sort of a recalibration of China's engagements on the peacekeeping front. And I think it does a number of things. One, it enables Beijing to demonstrate commitment to the continent, given that the majority of the world's peacekeepers are African and most peace missions are on the continent. Secondly, it also portrays Beijing as being willing to align its interests with those of its African partners, given the strategic importance that many African countries attach to participating in these missions. And then, of course, it also bolsters China's image as a responsible power, as a provider of global public goods, and that in turn cements its claim for the reform and the transformation of the global system, which is something that President Xi and China's top leadership keep espousing. Now, how does this generate influence for the PRC from a stability perspective? It does it in two ways. One, it puts China in a stronger position to shape multilateral security mandates and decisions. So one of the things that China's leaders have understood is that the bigger a country's troop and financial contributions to the UN, the greater its weight and influence in shaping those mandates. And indeed today, China contributes more peacekeepers than any of the UN Security Council members combined, and the vast majority of these troops are deployed on the African continent. And this is not lost on sort of African researchers and analysts. You know, the establishment of the UN peace and development trust fund, the standing up of an 8,000 strong rapid reaction force that was placed at the disposal of the United Nations. Sort of when you look at the discussions within the different sort of security, organized security think tanks in Beijing, there's a tacit understanding that the vast majority of these forces will be deployed in hot spots along the Belt and Road. So we begin to see some strategic logic behind the thinking. But what about on the negative side? So there's the flip side to it. And one of the things that we see clearly is a real concern by China's leaders about the security risks posed to its citizens, assets, and its investments along the Belt and Road. If you look at the China-Africa action plan, clearly commits the Chinese government as well as its African partners to safeguard the security of major domestic economic projects to protect the safety of Chinese nationals, Chinese companies, and major projects. And there's also a growing body of opinion among Chinese security professionals and academics that support the idea that the PLA should be deployed overseas in a protection role. And sort of if we look at the strategic review that recently came out of the Academy of Military Science, which clearly says that the One Belt, One Road strategy requires a global security posture on the part of the PLA. So we've talked about the national security law. We've talked about some of the capacity that is being developed in that regard. But there's another dimension, which is the proliferation of private Chinese security companies, which are increasingly having a presence in Africa's security sectors. Now, this is essentially very low-key. A lot of it is discrete advice to police, intelligence, and military forces. Advice in terms of surveillance, in terms of monitoring potential threats to infrastructure, Chinese-built infrastructure, and assets, and also capacity building for the host nation. So Uganda recently, within the framework of FOKAC, deployed its national army to protect Chinese interests after a wave of attacks on companies and personnel. In Kenya, we saw the Chinese domestic security agencies train and deploy a local security force to protect that railway. And there were attacks, there was a lot of tension around the building of that railway. So these are areas where we begin to see a very close sort of increasing interaction between African security sectors and African citizens. And that, you know, they're sort of human rights elements that could emerge from those sets of engagements. The other thing that I would like to emphasize is it is increasingly beginning to, it's now apparent, it's more and more apparent that the sorts of investments that we see Chinese companies, state backed companies engaging in on the African continent happen to be projects that have a national security underpinning to it. So you're talking about ports, you're talking about hydroelectric power stations, you're talking about nuclear facilities. These are, you know, there's a national security underpinning to it. So there's a very close sort of relationship between attacking or sabotaging a state asset and sabotaging a Chinese investment because of this element. And I think we're beginning to see that, we're beginning to see language that specifically tries to address that issue. So this is in terms of the security side. On the peacekeeping element, the bulk of China's peacekeepers happen to be serving in countries where high value projects are at stake. So Mali, Sudan, Darfur, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo. I mean these are countries that are well known in terms of sort of the high value projects, many of which are associated with the Belt and Road. In Mali, it's very interesting. You have infantry, you have special forces that are part of the UN mission over there. And part of their task is to protect infrastructure as well as provide force protection for the UN mission. In South Sudan, one of the mandates of the UN mission out there, one of the mandates of the PLA troops is to protect Chinese citizens. So we're beginning to see sort of that influence that Beijing has in shaping mandates is being done with an eye towards some of the security elements of the Belt and Road. So I think I'll stop there and I'll go over the narratives both Beijing's narratives as well as narratives that are coming out of the EU and other places and we'll look at how that plays out on the African continent. Thanks. Thanks Paul, that was great and I'll look to draw you out more on that in the Q&A session. I'd like to turn to Kin now to talk about BRI and the Burma context. Thank you, thanks Jacob. Thanks for having me on the panel. It's my voice doesn't clear and so good evening from Myanmar and I'll be sharing some of my observations on Myanmar experience with regard to China's Belt and Road Initiative and for this introductory remarks let me offer some of the overview of the BRI projects in Myanmar, how it has been rolling out over the past six years and as well as its potential implications on Myanmar peace process and peace and conflict in Myanmar. So I hope my discussion will have some contributions to understand BRI from different perspective. So first of all, we all know that China proposed BRI in 2013 but only after the energy government which is a national lead for democracy led by the Dawang San Suu Kyi the government came to power in 2016 China has become more vocal about its BRI projects in Myanmar. It should also be noted that when the energy government first come to power Myanmar condition peace as a prerequisite for BRI and encourage China to have a positive contributions to Myanmar peace process but nevertheless the table has turned after the Rohingya crisis. So due to the international diplomatic pressure on Myanmar, China has gained more leverage on pushing for its BRI project and so at the time China kind of understand that condition in the BRI project on the peace attainment peace in Myanmar is unrealistic and also Myanmar peace process is also the losing steams after three years of the energy government. So China has shifted back towards its conventional narrative of the development first strategy and promoted BRI as a solution for peace. So under this circumstance Myanmar signed the cooperation agreements under BRI back in 2017 May or during the first BRI summit so since then China's BRI has been gaining momentum in Myanmar so according to some sources China has proposed 24 projects under BRI and the list is expanding and of course some of the projects are under negotiations and some are already under the planning stage so some of the key projects in Myanmar include the Jau Q Deep seaport which will allow China to get access to the Indian oceans and also together with the rail link which will connect China the southern province of the southern China to the Indian oceans to the high speed railway and a new city near Yangon which is a currently commercial hub of Myanmar as well as some border economy zones but even though this project has been progressed over the past two years but actually these are not a very new project in fact most of them are the repaggaging of the same wine into a new bottle for example like the Jau Q Deep seaport and Jau Q the railway proposed as early as 2011 which is even before the concept of the BRI and so Myanmar participated in BRI partly hoping for the infrastructure development and business opportunities, job creations and of course to ensure China's constructive engagement in the Myanmar peace process because of the China's unique relations with the different stakeholders in Myanmar peace process as well as its geographical proximity with some of the conflict areas in Myanmar but on the contrary the implementations of the BRI projects can also create a more divisive society by fueling the militarization and human rights violations and widening the gap between the center and periphery in an already fragile state like Myanmar so even though China often mentioned BRI as a force for peace and a force for stability the evidence often showed that most of the unclashes happened in Myanmar over the past year along the route of the proposed China-Nyemah Economic Corridor so China-Nyemah Economic Corridor is the kind of the flagships projects and the BRI and so if these projects are fully implemented that will require a confiscation of the several hundreds if not thousands of acres of land or the relocations of the several thousands of people which will also likely to create the further human rights violations in Myanmar because due to the lack of Myanmar experience in successfully dealing with these big projects more importantly many of the projects and the CMEC are in the ethnic minority area but so far I think Beijing kind of presumed that the central government is the only legitimate partner to deal with and the Beijing kind of marginalized ethnic community local community from the process so despite the fact that both China and Myanmar side has repeatedly stated that the importance of the inclusions and the meeting the need of the local people so far many of the deals are behind the closed door and the information is available to the public let alone given the platform for public inclusions and participations so these are some of my findings that I covered in my upcoming USIB report on the BRI and the conflict dynamics in Myanmar because of the time constraints I'm not going to elaborate many of the embryo details but I'm happy to address if you have any further questions later on thank you thank you Ken and thanks again for calling in so late that would be really helpful and we'll draw some out in the question and answer session I will turn to Brian now to talk us through I'm grateful that the most complex nexus between conflict and BRI has already been addressed in Myanmar so let me zoom out quite a bit here and try to make it as brief as I can to make sure we have time for a discussion but for those who don't focus on Southeast Asia on a day-to-day basis it's worth remembering that this is an incredibly dynamic region the global scale it's doing quite well by most measures it's 650 million people 2.5 trillion dollar economy growing on average of about 5% if you're looking for the next centers of global growth in the world I would think that Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam countries of 100 to 250 million people are really some of the centers of gravity Southeast Asia has many suitors not just China and we'll get to China specifically in a second but it's not just China and the United States it's also Japan, India, the European Union so you have a really dynamic situation with all of the major economies in the world with deep interest and engaging quite heavily and it's also what I would describe as the fulcrum of strategic competition between the United States and China so there's a lot happening it's really a crossroads graphically and more broadly conceptually in terms of China specifically China is naturally a very critical economic and political and strategic player in Southeast Asia and that's just natural because it's China's backyard and this did not just start with BRI it did not start with Xi Jinping or the 20th century I mean this has been happening literally for thousands of years they're connected in incredibly deep ways tens of millions of Southeast Asians of Chinese ethnicity that form another bridge and so China is a major part of the fabric of Southeast Asia China is already the top trading partner of every country in the region but China's investment in the region is actually quite small compared to that of the United States, Japan, Europe and others but it's beginning to start to tick up and infrastructure investment is really one of the top areas of investment that Southeast Asian countries are looking for there's a massive infrastructure deficit that most of the developing countries of the region want to want to close so that they can take advantage of demographic dividends that are really upon them right now so BRI is really a tailor made for this situation I would say conceptually BRI has been welcomed by the region's leaders at least conceptually and it continues to be case in point by my math all ten Southeast Asian leaders will be in Beijing this week I think that shows some interest in their part in doing what they can to bring BRI investment certainly there have been some major hiccups along the way and also note that it's really encouraging the United States, Japan, Australia and others to really up their game because infrastructure is so important to the countries of Southeast Asia China is pushing in more and more heavily through the BRI and in some ways I would say it's actually a bit of a race to the top and certainly has been a driving force in getting United States development finance moving in the right direction no doubt there are challenges for China in the region while the countries of the region in my view see it natural that they'll have a deep economic partnership with China and they're trying to get as much from China as possible there are strategic concerns some more than others one thing also to point out about Southeast Asia zooming out is it's incredibly diverse region these countries have very different relationships with China you have Vietnam who would say 1,000 years of occupation by China that ended I think in the year 500 happened yesterday there's a lot of baggage about China looking to export communist revolution in the 20th century you also just have giant economies like Indonesia Indonesia has 250 million people plus in a democracy with a trillion dollar economy Laos is 7 million people and a 16 billion dollar economy so the way these kinds of countries can engage with China is certainly quite diverse I think some of the other concerns besides strategic and there is a lack of trust in China's broader strategic intentions in the region they also just don't want to be a Chinese dominion so invite in the United States Australia others to be part of the strategic fabric there's also concerns about Chinese workers and Chinese technology and a lack of technologies transfer certainly concerns about corruption especially after revelations of the now of the Malaysian government who was voted out of power last year largely because of the corrupt deals that the former prime minister was making with Beijing I think the Malaysia case has really brought to light some of the risks involved with deals with China be they BRI or otherwise they're actually causing countries in Southeast Asia to frankly drive a harder bargain with China and that's a good thing it's been happening in Myanmar with the Chakbu port and Indonesia I think in particular has been quite strategic and really telling China we want you to invest in here and here and here and not in here based on those experiences in general I would say BRI is the latest greatest vehicle for Chinese engagement in the region but Chinese engagement in Southeast Asia just by default as far as from new it's not going away I see China learning and adapting quite a bit I see them grappling with Malaysia and Sri Lanka in particular recognizing that if everything is a BRI project that's a whole lot of risk and they're looking to tailor things and I think we can confidently predict that they will they will adapt in some and be more effective moving forward but I'll leave it there Jake so we can have some time to discuss great thanks Brian if it's okay I'd like to actually kick the first question back to you which is you've written a little bit about the digital Silk Road China exporting its information technologies but obviously there's large concerns about sort of exporting its political model as well I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that in the Southeast Asia context given the amount of Chinese exports to the region I think that's an important question and I would also say it's great to be outside of my East Asia echo chamber for at least a couple of hours here today and so I would love to hear the view in South Asia Africa and elsewhere of this issue but China is moving in a very serious way with a digital push into Southeast Asia this is largely through so-called private Chinese companies but certainly with backing this is Alibaba Tencent and others who are buying putting capital into various startups and more established companies in Southeast Asia doing e-commerce and what have you 5G testbed in Thailand there's new I think in Alibaba Cloud and Malaysia and Indonesia so they're moving into this space in a pretty serious way and I don't think it's quite clear exactly what the strategic implications are China having access to vast amounts of data certainly gives commercial advantages these would be Japanese or European companies who are developing AI technology but the strategic stakes are a little less clear but certainly there's a potential espionage challenge there on the cyber governance model I think Southeast Asian governments are quite attractive to what China's been able to do they've been able to control content and sensor but still have a thriving economy where there's innovation so governments like in Vietnam and Thailand are trying to get into this and so you're seeing certainly the case in point is the new Vietnamese cyber law that enforces data localization and censorship and all sorts of concerns that we should have about that around human rights and organizing and those sorts of things but there's definitely a competition on the norm side in Southeast Asia as well Thanks Brian Andrew I know you've written a little bit about this Just a couple of points, one South Asia one Europe which was the other thing that was kind of kicked me quietly I mean very briefly I mean to take Pakistan I mean you have the kind of full spectrum in a place like Pakistan you have fiber optic cabling, you have satellites you have telecoms you have safe city initiatives and the cameras and the whole surveillance system, I mean it's quite comprehensive I'm struggling to mean all of the debates about CPEC there's been how little profile that has had as an issue I mean there have been lots of other issues where there's been pushback and debate and questions and things the kind of expanding presence in digital architecture and what the implications of that are in ways that of course have very clear ramifications for lots of the other issues for civil society, for all the other everything else that's been playing out in Pakistan for a long time there's been far less debated or questioned there than many of the other elements which I mean in a different context I mean some of these issues have crept up in India which has where there is of course significant Chinese digital presence as well and where some of those debates have again not been driven I mean there have been security concerns raised privately but in some respects it's been the wider debate that started to play out about these things that's really started to kick those questions off and in other in the European case and the striking thing there is of course that it's not just advances in developing countries I mean it's advances through this in to advanced economies key U.S. allies in ways that direct security ramifications when it comes to information sharing, intelligence sharing mobilization for NATO I mean NATO is undertaking a review at the moment of the security implications of China's presence in both physical and digital infrastructure across a number of these focused on a number of these different pieces I think in some ways the digital pieces kind of crept up a little bit on everyone later some of these things are being addressed I think much later in the day by various actors than some of the more familiar pieces I think it's partly because what's played out in China itself when it comes to surveillance, social credit what's played out in Xinjiang all of these sorts of things have become more and more evident in the last little window and I think had in some ways been below certain people's radar screens and of course the digital piece integrates all of the different elements of exporting models security concerns, competitiveness concerns when it comes to Chinese industry and so I think it is the place where I think there's going to be a lot more focus when it comes to various countries looking at providing alternatives providing alternative financing and things on Europeans, hair, Japan I think there's still a sense there's been a bit of a lag on this issue relative to its importance Ken I can't see you do you know are there any digital projects as part of CMEK or are you seeing Chinese investment and sales in those areas in Burma? Mostly like current many of the key projects are in the infrastructure area especially the hard infrastructure but so actually like in terms of the these things because of the lack of information we don't have access to what kind of projects are really on the list but on the ground that we are seeing that China has been doing a lot of influence in terms of the digital space as well for example like especially many of the cell phones using handsets that are used in Myanmar more than 80% they are the Chinese mage so this kind of in terms of the and the brands like Huawei OPPOR and this kind of the Chinese brand and so I think that that were also the part of the the Chinese it's not intentional or the I'm not sure but this kind of the Chinese influence on the digital market is already happening and also there are also some and conference the same sources but I seem to check with some other sources of course but some of the sources define that revealed that China has been selling its cloud system way lower than the average price which has been given by the other countries so I think these kind of things are also noting in Myanmar as well Thank you I'm about to move to audience questions but I want to ask one more question to the panelists there seem to be some different views in the opening remarks on the question of ports and the potential for sort of the Chinese security role in some of these port projects so I wonder Andrew if you could maybe respond to sort of Paul's comments on that and then Paul if you could kind of talk a little bit about why my sense was you see a larger potential for in the future Chinese military role towards in Africa so I'd want to just kind of tease that out a little bit South Asia the skepticism in my remarks is specifically about Guadar as a dedicated Chinese facility I think the naval cooperation with Pakistan is already underway mostly conducted through Karachi and China has a number of the depth of the military relationship in Pakistan means that I think China has pretty close to carte blanche when it comes to being able to use and expect to be able to use naval facilities in Pakistan in future it just doesn't necessarily have to be Guadar Guadar is more sensitive in terms of the kind of response it elicits I think China could get most of the same benefits through choosing not to use Guadar specifically but using Omerar which is just up the coast continuing to use Karachi as the focal point that it already has so I mean I see there being significant expansion in naval cooperation between China and Pakistan I think still a question mark about whether Guadar will be the locus point for it and Pakistan is the country of course where this is kind of relatively straightforward in South Asia when you look at some of the other cases I mean of course the port calls the PLA submarines had in Colombo were the precipitating factor for the reason that Major Pucks had got driven out of office so when it comes to the I mean India helping to stitch the opposition coalition together and things for the subsequent elections all of what then happened and I think that has been a kind of sense that in South Asia there are some red lines where yes it might be possible to make a couple of port calls and things like that but in terms of reliable long-term facilities it's very hard to see what they would look like it's very hard to see the Maldives being a case of that it's hard to see Sri Lanka of course the nature of the agreements around Hamban Tota has been quite restrictive it's not that there won't be governments that will allow port access and things it's just a few of the PLA Navy making bets over a long time frame on this I struggle to see where outside Pakistan what your good options are not Bangladesh either I'll leave Europe Thanks Paul is that more or less the sort of arrangements you foresee yes I mean for the time being of course it's still evolving and the security discussions that are happening in China as well there's no consensus on this just by looking at the behavior of the government in general there seems to be a mix it's really a security mix what Beijing would like to have is a flexible flexible arrangements that provided presence that provided the ability or the capacity to be able to assure its personnel as well as assets in different places and I think that's why Jibouti works very well for China and the question is was that deliberate or was it an opportunity that the Chinese were able to secure but I think it works very well in the sense that you have the dual you have the dual use of it it can be justified within an international framework namely the counter the counter piracy effort in the Gulf of Aden as well as the Gulf of Guinea so that makes it much less sensitive and it's a narrative that is easily started on the African continent because essentially it's seen as part of China's push to develop peacekeeping capabilities civilian evacuation and that sort of thing but it it is very evident that that mixing happens outside of the Jibouti context so if you look at all the recent security agreements that China has signed with different African countries they have all been foreshadowed by by port visits as well as naval exercises and each of these agreements so I'm talking about Nigeria, talking about Cameroon talking about Ghana, talking about Tanzania each of these agreements so they will have a security component to it but they're all framed within the framework of the 2017 maritime you know security cooperation under the maritime cooperation under the maritime maritime cooperation under the Belt and Road initiative so you see that mixing in Namibia as well and the Bagamoyo port project which is just a few kilometers away from a major military training facility and base that the Chinese military has built in that country so one sees that sort of mixing of commercial military security you can throw people to people in there as well as I had explained early on which is the model that I think Beijing is comfortable with whether that remains the way it is in the next 5 to 10 years I think we should watch that space but definitely I think they've been able to find a model that they're comfortable with both from a narrative perspective as well as as well as strategic communication that Africans are not used to the PLA uniform just yet and I think the folks in Beijing are very very keenly aware of that thank you so I'll turn to the audience now for questions just raise your hand if you have a question when the mic gets to you identify yourself and phrase your question in the form of a question please let me start with Priscilla here thank you I'm Priscilla Klap with USIP I'd like to just add a couple of points to Kin-Kin's excellent presentation Kin-Chua-Chi's excellent presentation and I've also had the advantage of reading her paper which is wonderful I have further information that the Chinese vision of the CMEC the China Myanmar Economic Corridor is very strategic and it is designed to basically to tie the infrastructure the basic infrastructure of Myanmar to the basic infrastructure of China transportation, banking cyber information energy you name it all of the basic structures of infrastructure the basic structures of the economy and that doesn't mean it's going to happen but that means that this is a vision that they have for the economic corridor I think there's going to be enormous resistance to this particularly with the top leadership I mean beginning with the top leadership so I don't think we're going to see it happen certainly not overnight and I think that the government has already demonstrated its willingness to bring public opinion and popular views into this whole development because they've developed policies for full assessment of any project before it can go ahead and that assessment is going to take into account economic, social, environmental all of these different impacts that it can have and I also have been looking at the response of other donors many donors Japan, US and Australia are recognizing that Myanmar needs the capacity to do this kind of assessment and they're planning aid programs to help them with it so I think that this is going to be a major test of BRI in Myanmar and I mean it should be because it borders on China Myanmar is obviously of strategic importance to China in ways that Africa isn't, I mean it's right next door and I think that they would feel more comfortable if they had it annexed and yes, they are involved and there is a plan for cyber and I've been told recently that Huawei is in partnership with a former military officer running the Myanmar Cyber Security Center Really helpful, thank you Good afternoon, my name is Sakira, I'm a president of a campaign called Sakira's International Group I want to say it's a question though China has done a lot in Africa I come from Kenya, it has done a lot in Africa from the rural area my focus, I focus on agriculture so China doing a lot in Africa even while we talk about security last week we just finished an event at Hojoon Hopkins on transfer of knowledge and skills training to Africans or to Chinese so we keep talking about China, China, China China, we don't know how they signed agreement with the leaders, African leaders we just talk but we people on the ground know China has done a lot has done for them something as well so what we need to be talking about the leaders because the ones who signed the contract what was in the contract, nobody knows how many years, nobody knows so whom are we planning so when it comes to security I think China would do better because they empower people, conflicts and poverty what brings conflict mostly is poverty so if they empower the young people the women and everybody I think the country can have a peace even if they are bringing in security because their security is to cut for their investments you can't get somebody's security to go and take care of somebody's door and when your house is without a security so I think I agree with China mostly but looking at the policies, what do we do the people to talk about and to do they are the leaders but I think China has done a lot of good in Africa and I think they can go along with the local people and the local development thank you Paul do you want to respond to that at all it's sort of I think the story of China-Africa relations is still being written I think it's a long story China China and Africa goes all the way down to the Tang dynasty organized relations between Africa and China that's where it begins that's what the Chinese government talks about that's what Chinese diplomats on the continent invoke that's what's happening in the academic field so China is trying to communicate that message on the continent I think the story is evolving it's evolving I think one belt, one road you're going to see a lot of adjustment along the way the Chinese have shown that they do have a proclivity for making tactical tactical adjustments we see it today, they're coming out with a document that is looking at sustainability that is trying to address some of the criticism that has been coming out whether that will happen is a different question altogether but the Chinese do have that the proclivity to be flexible and to try and align their interests with the interests of their local partners but having said that a lot of how this relationship will evolve strategically in the future will depend heavily on African agency both in terms of the governments as well as independent actors now one of the things that we see on the continent is really a proliferation of independent research independent voices on China-Africa relations contributing a lot to the policy debate framing the policy debate in very constructive ways and I think this is positive because one has to recognize the players in the relationship between China and its African partners is not just limited to the governments it's not just a government to government thing and Kenya is an excellent example of that where you had a very robust engagement by the private sector by civil society as well as the media in demanding for accountability for the negotiations around the SGR to such an extent that the government has had to come out several times to explain how that project was conceived just a few months ago the parliament launched an independent investigation into the circumstances under which Mombasa was given up as collateral in order to secure the loan to build the SGR that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't had this level of ownership and engagement that you're beginning to see outside the government framework and it is going to have an impact China cares about its image on the continent Beijing is going to have to take those views into consideration otherwise we're going to see the kind of pushback that we've seen in countries like Lesotho countries like Zambia, Kenya, South Africa countries like Cameroon and Ghana so I think the story is still being told it's still evolving we just have to see where it goes in the next 5 to 10 years Thank you. I'm Paul Lee I'm from Autumn Light Production I make films I want to thank you for a very insightful overview from the region perspectives about the opportunities and threats behind BLI but we have also avoided the 800,000 ton gorilla in this space that's the United States of America Secretary of State Pompeo has been actively dissuading countries NGOs and companies from engaging with BLI this administration sees BLI as a direct competitive if not aphesarial stands against the Indo-Pacific initiative undoubtedly Xi Jinping, his cohorts and whatever cronies running state enterprises will use BLI as a guise to extend near-term influence and longer-term command and control of the regions instead of economic opportunities do we see BLI and the Indo-Pacific initiative as a preamble to a possible confrontation between the two great powers and if that is to be a reality what will be the steps that will lead to that great thank you Brian can I ask you to respond to that if you feel free to jump in yourself so it's just a couple of observations I don't know if it answers the question but my understanding is that US companies though are looking to engage in BLI projects so GE is looking for opportunities where it can plug into the massive projects that are happening so I think below the rhetoric here in Washington there's a different reality and American companies are everywhere and looking to take advantage and I think it's been interesting to see the thaw politically between China and Japan as well where there are obviously competitors especially in Asia but there is agreement that Japanese companies will participate potentially in BLI projects where it makes sense you know I think BLI has quite effectively gotten people thinking harder in Washington and at the multi-lateral development banks here in Washington also in Manila at the ADB about how can we be more effective certainly there's some potential with the doubling of OPIX capacity to land and trying to get American businesses more engaged in this front I this is a much broader conversation about the United States and China heading towards a Cold War or a true conflict but there's no question there is strategic competition and there are a lot of things that the United States needs to do to be more competitive in that competition and certainly a more comprehensive economic policy including a trade policy for Asia is one of the major things that is missing Shinji Amaguchi from Japan's NITS my question is about actually it's a very interesting conversation when it comes to the security impact of the BLI of course the deployment of force is always important but my question is about the do you see any correlation between the China's arms export rising and BLI do you guys have any insight or details Andrew or Paul that might be we're beginning to see we're beginning to connect the dots we're beginning to connect the dots so there's it's gone beyond just the traditional a mill to mill relationship and if you look at the Belt and Road documents that were signed last year the forum for China Africa Corporation it creates 50 new programs security programs that kind of look at counterterrorism, infrastructure protection citizen protection asset protection and all of that a budget was assigned for that for that particular purpose I have a figure here between 2007 and 2011 1.3 billion was loaned in security assistance to African countries in the non-traditional security areas outside of the mill to mill partnership I mean this correlates this correlates to the sorts of programs that we see emerging as the Belt and Road continues to unfold so yes there is a correlation we're beginning to see that and I think we'll see more of that as the initiative continues to unfold very briefly clearly the countries for instance in South Asia where China has the pre-existing significant military and intelligence relationship which are in turn often intertwined with arms sales have then fed into different dynamics when it comes to the scale and scope of what's been envisaged under some of the BRI investments obviously Pakistan is one of the largest focal points of China's arms sales and was one of the early countries to agree such an expansive package obviously the Sri Lankan case particularly in the late stages of the Civil War was in a certain sense a precursor and the situations differ of course particularly after the Civil War was over I think you can also look in both of those two cases as examples where there clearly was a view to deepen a certain form of security relationship in the case of Sri Lanka that was in a certain way disappointed by the fact that by the fall of Rajapaksa and but I think the arms sales, the military relationships and the intelligence relationships and therefore what might be expected further down the line from certain Belt and Road investments I think you can see cases where those things have been intertwined I mean the Pakistani case in another way you can say the security thing is on such a separate track and so deep-rooted and it goes back decades so you don't see so much behavioral shift there but clearly there's elements of correlation the question is which way the causality goes Alright we have time for one last question Madam I wanted to bring up an issue which our panel and this panel I don't think we all had the opportunity to address and that is the issue of oversight we keep on saying we don't know the long-term effects and it's a new program but in it there are no built-in mechanism for oversight so who is going to hold China or participants of BRI accountable especially for the effects of BRI on local communities around the world right now some communities are thinking it's a good thing it's happening but the long-term effects nobody is able to hold anybody accountable so it's an issue that we have to continue to struggle with and an urgent one because once the train leaves the train station it would be so hard to bring them back to try and manage the process or even to hold people accountable I want to turn to Kin one last time to talk about her how she would envision additional oversight certainly in the Burma context and then open up to the panelists for any ending remarks and then we'll depart Kin? In terms of the oversight I think the role of the civil society empowering the civil society is very important especially in Myanmar like in most of the cases like the previous Miss Dong Dan project because of the activism from the civil society like this kind of project has been hold so I think with regard to the BRI and overseeing this project I think it's really important to bring civil society and the other thing is I think the media also can also do this kind of oversight as well because the investigative journalism is very important especially in terms of the part of the war which is the information for the BRI is very lagging especially in Myanmar many of the people, ordinary people, they do not have much information even for us which has been following this kind of these projects very closely following this kind of project it's very hard for us to get certain informations of the confirmed informations because both side, both government and the Myanmar and China are not very active in releasing the relevant informations to the public so I think in that case the media and civil society can play a very powerful role in overseising this kind of project thank you great I think that's a really good note to end on this has been a fascinating and wide ranging discussion please join me in thanking the panelists