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Belt and Road impact on Africa and the Mediterranean is big and getting bigger - but is it benign or menacing?

China's Belt and Road Initiative, the brainchild of President Xi Jinping, is moving forward and being taken more seriously than ever before - and with reason. Earlier this year, it recruited Italy, a G-7 member and an EU state with as many seats in the European Parliament as France or Britain.

The Belt and Road Initiative kicked off in 2013 as "One Belt One Road". Counterintuitively, the "belt" is the overland route from China to Europe, roughly mimicking Marco Polo's 14th century route, and the so-called "road" is the sea route.

More than that, Belt and Road is a global strategy involving infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and international organisations in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The initiative was unveiled by Chinese "paramount leader" Xi Jinping in September 2013 during visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia, and was thereafter promoted by Premier Li Keqiang. In March, Xi abolished presidential terms limits, allowing himself to serve for as long as he lives. He is 65.

Effectively, the Belt and Road is a vast patchwork of things, mostly financial in nature, though often with engineering backup and military and naval resources in the wings. Ideally and benignly, its purpose is to put in place things that would not be put in place without "last mile" financing - a bridge here, a tunnel there, the completion of a road here, the erection of a cell phone tower there.

Such varied things are at the heart of Belt and Road, or strictly speaking the "belt" of it. Much emphasis is laid on rare macro benefits, like the third worlder who scores big in world markets with his own personal barbeque sauce. And too little attention is given to a multiplicity of less eye-catching micro-successes that allow a producer to reach a market a few miles away because a bridge is built or a road is completed.

More ominously though, the "road" involves the creation and deployment of a blue water navy and its seizure of the Spratly Islands, a disputed group of islands and more than 100 reefs and atolls in the South China Sea off the coasts of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam, totalling 500 acres of land, but spanning 164,000 square miles.

Based on a historic document called the "nine dash line", the concept surfaced in 1947 to buttress a claim by Taiwan.  But the matter was unresolved. In 2012, however, China renewed the claim, first with fishing boats and then with naval forces and military engineers who, over the next few years built a substantial air and naval station athwart the main Asia-Europe trade lane.

Unhappy about this, the Philippines referred the matter to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Specifically, the Philippines sought clarification whether China's nine-dash line can negate the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone as guaranteed under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), of which China is a signatory. China rejected a summons to appear. In China's absence court concluded that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within the nine-dash line.

Separately, China's blue water navy has made the western Indian Ocean one of its permanent stations, supposedly to suppress Somali pirates, who are not much in evidence today because of a considerable European-led naval presence in the area.

If one forgets the growing number of trains from China to Europe, or the untapped - and likely to remain so - Northern Sea Route over Russia, one is stuck with the southern route through Suez that is increasingly under Beijing's control. There is the intriguing China-Turkey route across the Caspian Sea too, but that will only attract cargo when the Black Sea creates consumer-rich hinterlands, which it has yet to do.

So what we have is a Chinese naval presence akin to that of 19th century Royal Navy's guarding the sea-lanes to India, except this time we have a new India that is robust, independent and independent-minded.

Yet with China able to exert pressure on the eastern Asia Europe the supply chain, it matters less how vulnerable the Chinese might be to similar pressures exerted in the west end, because what could be done against one could be done against the other. To some minds, this encourages good behaviour all 'round.

Taking a darker view, as does hawkish Paul Nantulya of the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, attached to the National Defense University in Washington, DC, one might say as he does: "China's return on investment from increased port access and supply chains is not all about economics. In five cases - Djibouti, Walvis Bay (Namibia), Gwadar (Pakistan), Hambantota (Sri Lanka), and Piraeus (Greece) - China's port investments have been followed by regular People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy deployments and strengthened military agreements. In this way, financial investments have been turned into geostrategic returns."

More benignly, the EU Council met on March 22 to discuss a common EU approach to China, which was to be the basis for the EU-China Summit to be held in April. Ironically, the next day the Italian government signed on as a member of the Belt and Road initiative. China would come up with fresh financing for infrastructure, and anyone who will lend profligate Italy money was welcome.

Some in the EU were of much the same mind at first as fresh Belt and Road funds were viewed as a real opportunity for European economic recovery after the Eurozone crises. But saner heads urged a "wait and see approach". There was on reflection a greater understanding that while the Belt and Road promised global development, it carried long-term and even mid-term risks and liabilities.

In the end, EU attitudes hardened and signalled an end to the unfettered access for Chinese companies in the European market, as Beijing was failing to reciprocate by liberalising its market. Reciprocity as an EU policy was taking shape. But to effectively implement it, there would have to be joint European response, a near impossibility if each country makes its own side deals.

Then there is Africa. East Africa is being connected by finished ports, pipelines, railways and power plants built and funded by Chinese companies and lenders, warns Mr Nantulya from the African Centre for Strategic Studies.

For example, a standard gauge railway connecting Mombasa to Nairobi - the biggest investment in Kenya since its independence - is the flagship Belt and Road project in East Africa. The electric railway from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, where China established its first overseas naval base and has stakes in a strategic deep water port, is another. Djibouti connects planned and completed Chinese port clusters in Sudan, Mauritania, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia, Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Cameroon, Angola and Namibia. Another route links Djibouti to Gwadar, Hambantota, Colombo, Myanmar and Hong Kong. The final arc of this corridor connects Walvis Bay to Chinese port clusters in Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya.

These revived trade routes help China diversify its supply chains and create a China-Indian Ocean-Africa-Mediterranean Sea Blue Economic Passage to connect Africa to new maritime corridors in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. Beijing's military posture matches its expanding maritime and naval reach under Belt and Road.

What it all adds up to is now a matter of speculation in economic, diplomatic and strategic circles as Belt and Road becomes larger and larger - and more expensive and possibly more threatening.

Today questions arise whether China, more damaged by the trade war than the United States, having suffered quarterly GDP forecast decline, albeit by only one basis point, would only have to suffer another to be put into recession. Belt and Road was conceived in better times, when big spending was conceivably a good bet. Is continued expansionism sustainable - if one could apply that much abused term in its original sense?

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