Nouvelles routes de la soie et investissements chinois en Asie du sud-est : gagnant-gagnant ?

The Belt and Road Initiative, announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, marks a turning point in relations between China and the rest of the world. It is a very ambitious project aimed at strengthening transport, energy and communication infrastructure between China and the countries of Asia, Africa and Europe. The initiative was first introduced in Kazakhstan in September 2013 to highlight the importance of land routes through Central Asia to connect China to Europe. A month later, the NRS was the subject of a second official speech in Indonesia to mark the crucial role of Southeast Asian shipping routes for China to source and export. In May 2017, a summit of the New Silk Roads (NRS) was held in Beijing, in the presence of 29 foreign heads of state, confirming the diplomatic success of the initiative. At its 19th congress in October 2017, the Chinese Communist Party included it in its founding charter along with Xi Jinping's "thought", to emphasize that China's new strongman would make it a structuring element of the Chinese diplomacy for this 21st century. In fact, the NRS, which originally included 65 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa, includes 71 countries in 2018, including some in Central America and the Caribbean, and shows a desire to expand in South America, whose relations with China have developed strongly. These first five years give the impression that China has gone from success to success at the expense of its main competitors, the United States, Japan and the European Union. However, this first positive sequence of the Chinese initiative announces the beginning of economic, political and geostrategic difficulties. The time for announcements has passed and we are entering a second phase where the promises of massive investments in infrastructure, and its expected positive effects for economic development, must now materialize. Host countries are discovering that Chinese projects are not always to their advantage and are creating debt that they will find difficult to repay. Political alternation, in the few countries where elections are held, sometimes brings to power governments that wish to revise, or even cancel, the agreements signed. The "checkbook diplomacy" enabled by the NRS has led the majority of Southeast Asian countries to resign themselves to near-annexation of the South China Sea by China, but this result is fragile. . This chapter analyzes this change of sequences, taking as an example the countries of Southeast Asia and their political representation, ASEAN. We will begin by studying the influence of the NRS on Chinese investments in the region. Chinese investments abroad, whether made by public or private companies, do not obey a single economic logic, but are also part of the political strategy of the central government and/or local authorities. In the second part, we will study the economic problems created by the projects directly linked to the NRS and the reaction of certain governments.