Chinese leader Xi Jinping must feel like he is playing a game of whack-a-mole. After years of easy political, economic, and diplomatic gains, he has more recently had to deal with a series of problems, one popping up after another.
His draconian COVID-19 policies have set back the economy and now have given rise to public discontent.
For over a year, China has had to cope with cascading financial strains set loose by the failure of the real estate giant Evergrande, a serious matter to which Beijing has only recently and belatedly responded.
It has become increasingly clear in recent months that the once-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”) faces financial problems that raise questions about its viability. And if that were not enough, rates of terrorism along the BRI have also begun to increase costs and add to worries about viability.
The BRI’s greatest terror problems have arisen in Pakistan. That country is, of course, particularly plagued by terrorism, but it is also one of the BRI’s biggest participants. The most recent incident concerns a bomb detonated at the gates of Karachi University’s Chinese Language and Culture Institute, which houses the region’s Confucius Institute. The bomb killed the terrorist as well as a Pakistani driver. It also killed three Chinese teachers and severely injured a fourth teacher. Reports indicate that Beijing has evacuated the entire Chinese faculty. A terrorist group, the Baloch Liberation Army, from Pakistan’s troubled northwest region, claimed responsibility.
This is only the most prominent event. Chinese nationals have been widely targeted for some time. In 2021, the Taliban tried to assassinate China’s ambassador to Pakistan with a bomb that devastated a hotel. The ambassador only barely escaped death. In the northern part of the country, terrorists attacked a bus carrying Chinese nationals to the site where the BRI was constructing a dam. Nine Chinese and four Pakistanis died.
In Karachi, a crowd attacked a dental clinic run by Chinese nationals, killing one employee and wounding the elderly dentist on site. The Baloch Liberation Army has attacked the Chinese Consulate in Karachi as well as the stock exchange because, the terrorists claimed, it is controlled by Chinese interests.
According to the Washington-based Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, China was the focus of 160 incidents of terrorism or civil unrest between 2018 and mid-2021. In one sense, none of this is surprising. China has, after all, become the largest lender to the developing world and has some 440,000 nationals working abroad, 93,500 in Africa alone.
So far, Beijing, though acknowledging the terrorist threat, has refused to back away from its BRI. At least it makes that claim on the terrorism front. It has already paused growth in the program for financial reasons. Qian Feng, a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, commented on the terrorism, insisting that China “can’t wait for an end to terrorist activities before starting new projects,” The Wall Street Journal reported. This kind of commitment received support in a recent visit to Beijing by Pakistan’s new prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif.
China has already put pressure on host countries to step up security, something these impoverished nations can ill afford. Pakistan, for example, reports detailing 30,000 troops for this purpose—no small expense.
China, in challenging Western influence, seems to have brought the same animus as the United States and the ex-colonial European powers face. Despite this unlooked-for development, none of this will stop the BRI. Beijing has already invested too much diplomatic capital and the project to allow that. But with terrorism on top of serious defaults and renegotiations, the pace of advance will slow appreciably. The BRI will not be the world changer that Beijing claimed for it and that the West feared.
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