YCW Talk: China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Categories: Event
Date: 04/06/2019
Time: 19 h 00 - 21 h 00
Location: Bon Jour
Links: iCal - Google Calendar

YCW Brussels Belt and Road series: “China’s BRI and the ‘Debt Trap’ question” with Agatha Kratz, Associate Director at Rhodium Group (June 4th)

Last April, the second Belt and Road Forum opened in Beijing, promoting China’s most debated foreign policy plan, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Since its announcement, criticism has grown around what is seen as President Xi’s signature initiative, with a number of recipient countries delaying and renegotiating projects with China. Central to such push-backs are concerns around debt sustainability.

The US in particular has led the counter-mobilisation against the BRI, emphasising the rhetoric of the “Chinese debt trap”, in which China putatively indebts countries knowing they will be unable to repay their loans and then seizes the defaulting country’s valuable assets. Tales of the debt trap have common characteristics: they are above all promoted by US politicians and media, they have no empirical basis, and they are replete with themes that invoke classical Yellow Peril images about China and Chinese.

The recent case of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port is taken as an example: is this really representative or an outlier? How is economic influence built, and how can we think of it in the case of China?

About Agatha Kratz

Agatha Kratz is an Associate Director at Rhodium Group. She leads the development of European opportunities and contributes to research on EU-China relations, China’s economic diplomacy and outward investment, and the Belt and Road Initiative. She is also a non-resident Adjunct Fellow in the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Simon Chair in Political Economy. A Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London studying China’s railway diplomacy, Agatha was previously Associate Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), Asia & China Program. She was Assistant Editor for the China Economic Quarterly from 2016 to 2017, and served as Editor-in-Chief of China Analysis, ECFR’s quarterly journal, until December 2015. Prior to ECFR, she was a Junior Fellow at Asia Centre in Paris. Agatha has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Masters in Finance from SciencesPo Paris, as well as a Masters in Public Administration from the London School of Economics and Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.