Xuehan Shang (left) and Zhang Sheng
After the incoming 2022 Nepali General Election ends in November, no matter how the election result would appear like, the newly elected government will take the responsibility of leading Nepal toward development and prosperity despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasingly destabilizing international politics of the world. One of the tasks that the Nepalese government will certainly deal with in 2023 is how to fully utilize the possible potentials of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for the development of Nepal.
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping first came up with his idea of the BRI during his visit to Kazakhstan, and five years later, Nepal signed the BRI agreement and formally became a member of the BRI. For China, the year of 2023 will mark the 10th anniversary of the BRI, and thus the Chinese government will certainly be eager to broadcast about the success of the BRI projects in order to answer the voices of doubts and criticism both from the West and from certain groups in the Chinese society itself. When it comes to the progress of the BRI in Nepal, unfortunately not much success can be observed in the past five years, and the progress of the BRI projects in Nepal seemingly has been restricted in a stage of stagnation.
In the last five years, one can certainly feel the huge excitement from both sides of the Himalayans about the great potential of China-Nepal cooperation in the framework of the BRI, and the Nepalese society was once also passionately looking forward to the future development of the BRI. Projects with historical significance, the China-Nepal Railway being the most famous one among them, were often the hot topics for discussions about the BRI, and many in Nepal enthusiastically waited for the BRI to turn Nepal from a land-locked state into a “land-linked” trade partner linking the commercial interactions between the world’s two most populated states.
A quite worrisome gap between this aforementioned beautiful blueprint and the unsatisfactory reality, however, soon emerged within these five years and caused fatigue for many newly disenchanted Nepali supporters of the BRI. Many Nepali friends candidly mention that they feel that the BRI is simply a project with beautiful rhetoric, and they are deeply confused why the Chinese are so passionate in making up vague terminologies with no actual meaning. For example, they fail to find anyone who is able to clearly explain the meaning of this terminology called “Trans-Himalayan Multi-Dimensional Connectivity Network” and to explain the difference between this vague terminology and the candid word “Nepal-China Cooperation.” Many common Nepalese citizens and even intellectuals feel exhausted by news about visits of important politicians, holding of events and conferences, incessant talking about potentials of the projects rather than realities of those projects, and those vague and sometimes even meaningless new terminologies created only for political rhetoric rather than for concrete practice.
The authors of this article do believe that the BRI is an ambitious and extremely meaningful project aiming at integrating China’s own economic success with the larger context of economic success of the developing world as a whole, and as for now the BRI is the project which has the highest potential of deepening economic interdependence and social interactions between China and Nepal. The most urgent problem at this moment, however, is that this is not the time we should be satisfied by talking about potentials of those projects, but should be demonstrating concrete progress of those projects. Promoters of the BRI in both China and Nepal must try their best to replace those beautiful but empty words with concrete actions in practice, and to convert those attractive but remote blueprints into actual progress that people can preserve.
When scholars who support the BRI discuss about flagship projects such as the China-Nepal Railway, it is astonishing that we are still talking about exactly the same things that we have been talking about in the last three to four years, because there is simply not much new progress in the last three to four years regarding the proposed construction of the railway. The most worrisome situation is that such a disappointing reality might continue. This year, government statements about the construction of the China-Nepal Railway again filled the headlines of all the newspapers and beautiful rhetoric was raised again when high-ranked officials met each other and looked forward into blueprint of the future.
Till today it seems like we have not seen any news about Chinese and Nepali technological experts actually going into the border area and conduct on-site investigation for the construction of the railway, not even to mention how long it might take for the actual construction process to initiate and to complete. Today, it seems like we are again stuck into the same cycle of trap that we have been struggling at for the last three to four years: we are excited by good signals sent out by government officials about the future of the railway construction, and we emotionally satisfy ourselves by reading those beautiful news instead of checking the actual progress of the projects. As a result, there might be no actual progress again for several years, and then we probably need new stories during the meeting of government officials in order to satisfy the emotional desire.
If China and Nepal do not join hands in breaking this vice cycle of trap and do not step out from the comfort zone and start combating hardship right now, we will always be trapped in this “yesterday-once-more” conundrum and all of our beautiful visions about the future would be nothing but castles in the air.
(Xuehan Shang is currently affiliated to the International Affairs program of the George Washington University, US and Zhang Sheng is an alumnus of Harvard University and he holds non-residential research fellowship from several Chinese and Nepalese academic institutions and think tanks.)
