The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China’s global infrastructure and investment programme, announced by Xi Jinping in two speeches in 2013: the overland “Silk Road Economic Belt” at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, on 7 September, and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” before the Indonesian Parliament in Jakarta that October. Since then China has signed cooperation agreements with about 150 countries for ports, railways, roads, power stations and telecoms, financed largely by Chinese state banks such as the Export-Import Bank of China and built by Chinese state-owned contractors. Its flagship projects, from Gwadar in Pakistan and Piraeus in Greece to the Mombasa–Nairobi railway in Kenya, the Laos–China Railway and the freight trains from Yiwu to Madrid, show both what the initiative has built and why it is argued over: who pays, who operates the assets, and whether borrowers can carry the debt.
Gwadar and the $62 Billion China–Pakistan Economic Corridor
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is described as the most developed land corridor of the BRI. Valued at $46 billion when it was agreed in 2015, its projects were worth about $62 billion by 2020: highways and railways linking the ports of Gwadar and Karachi with northern Pakistan and western China, and more than $33 billion of power plants meant to end Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages. Once complete, the corridor is expected to cut the 12,000 km journey for oil shipments to China to about 2,395 km.
Its southern terminus is Gwadar, a deep-water port in Balochistan 533 km from Karachi and about 120 km from the Iranian border. Its first phase, agreed during Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji’s state visit in 2001 and begun in 2002, was inaugurated by Pervez Musharraf in 2007 at a cost of $248 million; China took control of the port in May 2013, and operational control now lies with the state-owned China Overseas Port Holding Company. Under CPEC, a further $1.62 billion of development was announced in 2015, and the port became formally operational on 14 November 2016, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif inaugurated it and army chief Raheel Sharif saw off the first convoy.
The costs have been political and human as well as financial. Local fishermen have protested against Chinese trawlers, and in 2019 the Baloch Liberation Army, which opposes the Gwadar Port City project, attacked the Pearl-Continental Hotel in Gwadar, targeting Chinese nationals. Pakistan assigned about 10,000 troops to protect Chinese investment at the start of the project, a number that rose to 15,000 by 2016. In January 2023 Pakistan approved a 300 MW Chinese-funded coal plant at Gwadar despite Xi’s 2021 pledge to stop financing coal power abroad, and in September 2025 China withheld support for the Main Line-1 railway upgrade, one of CPEC’s largest planned schemes.
Piraeus and COSCO’s 67% Stake, 2009–2021
In Europe the BRI’s flagship port is Piraeus in Greece. During the Greek debt crisis, in October 2009, the Piraeus Port Authority leased two container piers, Pier 2 and the future Pier 3, to a subsidiary of the Chinese state shipping group COSCO for 35 years. In 2016 Greece’s privatisation fund sold COSCO 51% of the port authority itself for €280.5 million, and in October 2021 COSCO received a further 16% for €90 million, taking it to 67%.
The container numbers moved quickly. The port’s pre-COSCO record was 1.5 million TEU in 2006, and the financial crisis cut traffic to 450,000 TEU in 2009. By 2017 the port was handling 3.69 million TEU, and the port authority’s pre-tax profit nearly doubled that year from €11 million to €21.2 million. The deal was opposed by dockworkers’ unions, who struck several times; workers later complained that wages, cut by government mandate during the crisis, had not been restored under COSCO.
Italy’s experience shows the limits of the European expansion. In March 2019 it became the only G7 country to sign up to the BRI, with a memorandum covering about €2.5 billion of deals, but in July 2023 Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government announced it would leave, saying the scheme had brought no real benefit to Italy’s economy.
Kenya’s $3.6 Billion Railway from Mombasa to Nairobi
Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) replaced a decayed colonial line: by 2016 passenger trains on the metre-gauge Uganda Railway, completed in 1901, took a whole day between Nairobi and Mombasa. The new line was built by China Road and Bridge Corporation, which hired some 25,000 Kenyans, at a cost of $3.6 billion, then the largest infrastructure project in Kenya since independence. The Export-Import Bank of China lent 90% of the cost; its $3.23 billion package, finalised in May 2014, was split into a concessional loan and a below-market export credit, with Kenya’s government paying the remaining 10%. A condition of the finance was an operator acceptable to the bank, which led Kenya to drop a planned international tender and hand the first years of operation to CRBC’s parent company.
The 472 km line opened for passengers on 31 May 2017, eighteen months ahead of schedule, and the Madaraka Express carried 2 million riders in its first 17 months; freight services began on 1 January 2018. Its viaducts let wildlife pass beneath the track through the corridor between Tsavo East and Tsavo West national parks. The finances have been harder. As of 2020 the railway’s operating costs exceeded its revenues, and the loan for the 120 km extension from Nairobi to Naivasha, opened in October 2019, about $1.48 billion at roughly 3.34% interest, began falling due in January 2021 in 30 half-yearly instalments running to July 2035. A second phase, intended to carry trains on through Nairobi to the Ugandan border, is part of the original plan.
Hambantota and the Debt-Trap Argument
No BRI project is cited more often in the debate over Chinese lending than Hambantota International Port on Sri Lanka’s south coast. China Exim financed the first phase with a 15-year commercial loan of $306.7 million at 6.3%, and China Harbour Engineering built it; President Mahinda Rajapaksa opened the port, named after him, on 18 November 2010. A second loan of $757 million at 2% followed in 2012. The port struggled to attract traffic, and by the end of 2016 the Sri Lanka Ports Authority had accumulated losses of about $696 million on it.
In July 2017 Sri Lanka’s new government agreed to lease the port for 99 years to China Merchants Port Holdings, which took a controlling stake in a joint venture with the ports authority for $1.12 billion. The money went into Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves and to repay short-term debts owed to non-Chinese creditors, not to retire the port loans. Concerns that the port could be put to military use delayed the deal for months, Sri Lankan opposition parties and unions called it a sellout, and India and the United States said Chinese control could harm their interests in the Indian Ocean. In 2020 the port handled 1.8 million tonnes of cargo.
Critics, including the first Trump administration, presented Hambantota as proof of “debt-trap diplomacy”. Many researchers dispute that reading. Deborah Bräutigam of Johns Hopkins University found in 2019 that borrowers had mostly sought the loans themselves and that the Sri Lankan case did not show a deliberate trap; a March 2018 Center for Global Development study found that between 2001 and 2017 China restructured or waived loan payments for 51 debtor countries without seizing state assets. Other evidence points to genuine problems: a 2021 AidData study at the College of William & Mary found that 35% of BRI infrastructure projects had run into major implementation problems such as corruption, labour violations, environmental hazards or protests.
The Laos–China Railway and the Yiwu–Madrid Freight Trains
Landlocked Laos had almost no railways: under French rule only the 7 km Don Det–Don Khon line was ever completed. The Boten–Vientiane line, the Lao section of the Laos–China Railway, runs from the Chinese border at Boten to the capital. Construction began at Luang Prabang on 25 December 2016, and the line opened on 3 December 2021. It crosses 167 bridges and passes through 75 tunnels, which carry 47% of the route, and it is a single electrified track built for passenger trains at 160 km/h, making Laos the first country linked to China’s high-speed network with Chinese technology.
The cost, about $5.97 billion, made it the largest and most expensive project ever built in Laos as of 2021. Sixty per cent came as debt from China Exim; the rest came from a joint venture 70% owned by Chinese partners, with Laos contributing $250 million from its budget and borrowing a further $480 million from China Exim. In 2019 the Lowy Institute estimated Laos’s debt to China at 45% of GDP, and in 2020 Fitch rated the country CCC for “excessive debt”. Radio Free Asia reported that by August 2023 about 85% of families displaced by the line had settled their compensation claims.
Overland to Europe, the China–Europe freight trains predate the BRI but were folded into it. The Yiwu–Madrid service, launched in November 2014 by the Swiss-registered InterRail Group with Chinese Railways and Deutsche Bahn, covers about 13,000 km through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany and France in about 21 days, against roughly six weeks by sea. Containers change trains at each change of track gauge, at Dostyk in Kazakhstan, Brest in Belarus and Hendaye in France. In 2024 the route through Belarus into Poland carried about 90% of China–EU rail freight, about €25 billion of goods, but that was only 3.7% of EU–China trade; most goods still go by sea, through ports like Piraeus.
These projects revive old routes in new form, as our guide to the original Silk Road shows, and two of their endpoints are profiled in detail in our pieces on the Port of Piraeus and the Port of Mombasa.