The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is Chinese premier, Xi Jinping’s, signature foreign policy project. It aims to spend a trillion dollars in infrastructure projects around the world. Hillman believes that this project is an imperialist project following the mold of Britain, France and other colonial powers. From extensive travel he points to the financial failures of many of the BRI projects due to ineffective feasibility studies, the pursuit of political rather than economic objectives, lower lending standards, and the inability of the recipient nations to afford the debt that comes with the projects.

The shortfall of this book is the difficulty in grasping an overall sense of the objective of the BRI. And perhaps that’s not the fault of the author, but of the (deliberately) nebulous nature of the initiative. Hillman also fails to explore alternative arrangements for developing nations who are unable to raise capital for crucial infrastructure projects. He explains how some nations dangle projects in front of China, Japan and Western countries thus forcing them to compete. But for many countries, Chinese financing becomes the only option. Certainly, the way to wooing developing nations from China should be long-term developmental support that does not require painful fiscal strictures or expensive commercial loans.

To his credit though, the debt crisis in Sri Lanka, Zambia, Ghana, and other developing countries has got both China and those nations to rethink. China is significantly cutting back on lending and adopting more stringent methods to evaluate potential projects. In that regard this book, which came out in 2022, has been prescient.