The 2015 BRI plan illuminates current Chinese Global Initiatives
What has the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ morphed into since its inception?
The Investigator | No. 09/2025
This month marks the tenth anniversary of the National Development and Reform Commission’s (NDRC) publication of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), ‘Vision and actions on jointly building silk road economic belt and 21st century maritime silk road’. This plan came out 17 months after the concept, then officially translated as ‘One Belt One Road’, was launched by Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Too little attention was paid to the plan at the time, but, like many party documents, it shed light on future intentions and still repays study a decade later. In particular, it illuminates the intention and nature of Xi’s three global initiatives, particularly the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI).
The foreign policy which the CCP now propagates emphasises a framework of a leading idea, the ‘community with a shared future for mankind’, underpinned by three initiatives: the Global Development Initiative (GDI), announced in 2021, the Global Security Initiative (GSI) in 2022, and the GCI in 2023. The BRI, in which CCP propaganda invested so heavily that it must remain, now plays a role similar to that of the sweeper in football. Its policies are embedded in two of these initiatives.
The first thing to note about this BRI plan from 2015 is that it came out not under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which focuses on implementation of policy rather than the making of it, but of the NDRC. This underlines that the BRI was more about the domestic needs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) than about foreign policy. For all countries, foreign policy is domestically driven, but the degree of solipsism is most developed in the CCP. The need for resources, markets and the export of overcapacity industries were, and are, important drivers of the BRI. Despite the NDRC plan’s title for section VI, ‘China’s Regions in Pursuing Opening-Up’, there is little in the plan about the PRC itself opening up to the benefit of outsiders. Rather, the focus is on how links with countries abroad will help the north, southwestern, coastal, and inland regions of the PRC develop and reform. Those hopeful that reports of ‘opening up’ mentioned in this month’s National People’s Congress reports presage true ‘win-win’ might want to take note.
One difference between the plan and the reality today is the change of tone. The optimism of 2015 has been replaced by a dour outlook. The PRC faces ‘winds and storms’; politically, stability and security are now centre stage. Internally, the economy hit turbulence shortly after the plan came out: the stock market crashed later in 2015; the Covid-19 pandemic has had lingering effects; and the real estate and debt chickens have come home to roost. Externally, the United States’ (US) pivot to Asia, beginning in 2012, gathered pace during the first term of Donald Trump, President of the US, while the CCP’s alignment with Russia and support for its full scale invasion of Ukraine have soured relations with Europe. The BRI plan from 2015 has little which presages the GSI, because it predated these changes.
However, the intentions of the GDI do feature. Its aims are broad. According to a front-page article in the party’s newspaper, the People’s Daily, from 2024, they ‘lead the world towards a new development path’, not least in global poverty reduction, agricultural cooperation, the sharing of innovation and industrial upgrading, and new energy and ecological protection projects.
So too the ambitions set out in 2015 aimed to lead the world towards a new development path. The BRI is often thought of in terms of infrastructure construction. But the plan enumerated five main elements, of which infrastructure was but one, if the most important:
Policy coordination: meaning intergovernmental and regional cooperation.
Facilities connectivity: i.e., infrastructure – not just transport and ports, but also energy and telecommunications.
Unimpeded trade: mutual recognition of regulations and mutual legal assistance; moves towards coordinated inspection, quarantine, certification, accreditation, standards, and statistical information; alignment of customs clearance facilities; cooperation in energy, research and development for new industries; and investment (although the flow seemed to be into the PRC: ‘We welcome companies from all countries to invest in China’).
Financial integration: bilateral currency swaps and settlement with other countries; the development of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank; cooperation over financial regulation.
People-to-people bond: essentially, the GCI.
The ‘people-to-people bond’ section envisaged cooperation in most areas: cultural, media, youth, student, sporting exchanges; easing visa regimes to increase tourism; medical cooperation (‘we should strengthen cooperation with neighbouring countries on epidemic information sharing’, a declaration doused in irony by the Covid-19 pandemic); science and technology cooperation, including joint laboratories and interactive technology transfer; cooperation between political parties, think tanks and non-governmental organisations (NGOs); and more.
This section is essentially what later became the GCI, even if that title took eight years to emerge formally. As an important front-page article in the People’s Daily said on the first anniversary of the GCI, in language echoing the 2015 plan, ‘Strengthening international cultural exchanges and cooperation is an important way to implement the Global Civilisation Initiative’. It went on to list most of the fields covered in 2015: education, health, the arts, tourism, and dialogue, and exchanges between youth, think tanks, political parties and the media.
The BRI plan published by the NDRC and the GCI are consistent in their aim: as the former puts it, to ‘provide the public support for implementing the Initiative (BRI)... to win public support for deepening bilateral and multilateral cooperation’ (‘public’ in this instance meaning foreign citizens). In other words, the GCI, which embodies the ‘people-to-people bond’ messaging from 2015, underpins the GDI, the GSI and the BRI.
On the face of it, who could object to the GCI? As Xi said at the ‘BRICS Plus’ leaders’ dialogue in Kazan in October 2024, ‘The Global Civilisation Initiative I proposed is exactly for the purpose of building a garden of world civilisations in which we can share and admire the beauty of each civilisation.’ Or, as the NDRC’s BRI plan claims, ‘it advocates tolerance among civilisations, respects the paths and modes of development chosen by different countries’ and ‘works to build a community of shared interests, destiny and responsibility featuring mutual political trust, economic integration and cultural inclusiveness.’
But there is a catch. In the BRI plan, there are only the mildest hints of the attitudes which the CCP holds tight, such as those set out in the infamous ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, more commonly known as ‘document no 9’, which excoriates the so-called values of the free and open nations. The BRI plan talks of being ‘an endeavour to seek new models of international cooperation and global governance’. ‘It advocates tolerance among civilisations, respects the paths and modes of development chosen by different countries…’ This is the premise for the CCP position on values and human rights, which must not be universal, but contingent upon national conditions and culture.
Given the circumstances of the BRI’s launch and the need to gather international support, the BRI plan from 2015 was unlikely to be confrontational. Subsequent tensions between the CCP and the free and open nations have removed such reticence. The GCI, linked by the CCP to a tolerant Chinese culture, modernisation and development path, is contrasted with the antagonistic model of the free and open nations:
‘Xi Jinping’s cultural thoughts are rooted in the fertile soil of Chinese civilisation and contain the civilisation gene of openness, tolerance, and eclecticism. In stark contrast to the ‘clash of civilisations’ advocated by Western scholars, we advocate “each civilisation appreciates its own beauty, appreciates the beauty of others, shares beauty with one another, and achieves harmony in the world.” [各美其美, 美人之美, 美美与共, 天下大同] China does not impose its own values and models on others, does not engage in ideological confrontation…’
‘The international community believes that the successful practice of Chinese-style modernisation has shattered the myth that “modernisation equals Westernisation”, forcefully demonstrating that there is more than one path to modernisation and that human civilisation is diverse and colourful. Countries can embark on their own distinctive paths to modernisation based on their own cultural heritage and actual national conditions.’
The GCI aims to change the world’s values from ‘universal values’ to values which better align with those of the CCP. Discussion of the GCI now reflects more openly the challenge to American supremacy, whose prime battlefield is the ‘Global South’, not least Africa. Mention of that continent is sparse in the NDRC’s BRI plan: for example, the list of multilateral cooperation mechanisms does not include the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, which has been held every three years since 2000 and is now a major event.
As the contest with the US has widened, so too has the scope and ambition of the GCI and the other initiatives. Policies and propaganda have been sharpened as the CCP attempts to bind to its side countries not aligned with the US and its allies. Of the four initiatives, the GCI is perhaps the most insidious. The others are clear in their intentions and methods, not least because they require the PRC to spend money abroad, but the GCI is less tangible. It sits in the natural operating ground of the United Front Work Department, which the CCP describes as its ‘third magic weapon’. Beneath its polished slogans, the GCI works to alter the value system which has reigned since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (greatly informed by the Chinese participants in the drafting committee) to one more attuned to the CCP’s interests.
The BRI plan from 2015 also exemplifies a lesson for the so-called ‘China watchers’. Attention paid to what the CCP puts out as vague ‘plans’, ‘opinions’, ‘guidance’, and ‘white papers’ is never wasted. These documents matter because the party must advertise.
Charles Parton OBE is Chief Advisor to the China Observatory at the Council on Geostrategy.
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