The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a transnational Chinese infrastructure development and investment initiative that stretches from East Asia to Europe, harkening back to the Silk Road which spread ideas and trade to Europe from Asia hundreds of years ago. However, times have changed and the Chinese BRI is no longer the same glorious Silk Road as it was during the Roman era. China’s deceiving portrayal of its new initiative as beneficial and benevolent is a mere facade for its true sinister intentions.

Beijing's hegemonic ambitions inevitably make many BRI nations indebted to China. Currently, China is building infrastructure way too expensive for nations to fund themselves, forcing them to borrow from China. In Sri Lanka, Chinese President Xi forced the Sri Lankan government to sign a 99-year lease handing over their main port, a BRI project built with Chinese loans, to China because Sri Lanka could not pay back the debt they incurred while building it. In Montenegro, the BRI is building “roads to nowhere”. The high amount of debt BRI nations incur due to infrastructure funding loans causes an economic slowdown and austerity measures to be implemented because the countries need to cut back government spending and increase taxes to pay back those debts to China.

In addition, China is using the BRI to offload its excess coal to developing nations. Since the Paris Agreement’s clauses of reducing coal dependency force China to reduce its coal dependency, its coal power companies need to look elsewhere to export its excess coal and build new coal power plants. Naturally, these coal power companies will seek to dump their coal in the easily accessible developing nations of the BRI in order to remain profitable. In fact, 58% of the 240 coal power plants already built within these developing BRI nations are high emission, provide low energy output, and lack efficient carbon capture technology. Since these plants cost money, developing nations will need to maintain these plants for the duration of their lifespan to maximize their investment, forcing these companies to stick with coal for at least 40 years. Unfortunately, China is planning on building 1600 of these polluted coal plants within BRI nations. In fact, The New York Times reports that these polluted coal plants would increase global coal emissions by 43%, resulting in 3° Celsius of warming and with that, devastating heat waves, decreased air quality, and increased sea levels. This 3° Celsius of warming is estimated to put 4.6 billion people, more than 50% of the world’s population, at risk of poverty. Since stopping a 0.5° Celsius increase in warming will save 153 million lives, stopping a 3° Celsius increase will save at least 918 billion people.

The BRI will make global temperatures soar even further through drilling Arctic oil. In the BRI, there is a major project called the Polar Silk Road (PSR). The PSR provides funds for Chinese companies to build drilling platforms with Russia in the Arctic due to the 35 trillion dollars worth of untouched oil and gas in the far north. Since there are no viable methods to clean up oil spills in the Arctic and there are 1.3 million gallons of oil spilled yearly in the US alone, the potential oil spills Arctic drilling would cause would kill wildlife and the fossil fuels extracted from the Arctic would lead to an additional 5° Celsius of warming on top of the 3° Celsius caused by coal plants, exacerbating poverty and causing over a billion deaths by raising the world’s temperature 8°.

Even worse, the BRI only encourages China's mass genocide. Since Xinjiang is the fulcrum of China’s BRI as it is China’s gateway to Central Asia, West Asia, and Europe, China has placed millions of Xinjiang’s ethnic Uighur Muslim population into "re-education camps", claiming that some of the minority Uighur populace are terrorists and preventing road and infrastructure construction in Xinjiang. However, the United Nations has expressed alarm over the forced relocation of millions of Uighurs to re-education and indoctrination camps solely based on their ethno-religious identity. The more Beijing-dependent nations in the BRI, there less opposition China faces with its sinister Xinjiang repopulation plan.

China’s BRI is an ominous initiative aimed to promote China’s self-interest and expand its global ambitions by creating debt traps for countries ensnared in its initiative, by allowing its coal companies to expand internationally, by using BRI loans to fund Arctic drilling, and by backing the Uighur genocide. Unfortunately, many nations around the world are succumbing to Beijing's sinister intentions. This only enables China to further extend its hegemonic soft power, year by year, country by country.