Belt and Road Is Still Central: China's Global Supply Chain Strategy
The Belt and Road Initiative was declared mature, complete, and even winding down in some Western coverage over the past several years. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan does not agree. The BRI retains a central role in the plan’s vision of how China builds and controls the global supply chains it depends on.
The 15th FYP frames supply chain strategy in terms of vertical integration and PRC control — not just participation in global trade flows, but ownership of the infrastructure, logistics, financing, and standards that govern them. The BRI is the primary vehicle for building that control offshore.
Specific BRI-linked priorities in the plan include rail links with Europe, development of China’s inland ports, a Silk Road e-commerce zone, and focused economic development in Xinjiang and Fujian as nodes in the network. Financing comes from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, and the Silk Road Fund — all Chinese-led institutions that operate parallel to Western multilateral lenders.
Beyond physical infrastructure, the plan targets digital and standards infrastructure through the same BRI framework. China is pushing its BeiDou satellite system as an alternative positioning and timing network, seeking to embed it in BRI partner country infrastructure as GPS dependency has been embedded in much of the rest of the world. In AI, the plan explicitly calls for creating a global organization, cooperation platforms, regulatory frameworks, and technical standards — the architecture of influence, not just the technology.
The underlying goal is a global economic order in which the critical infrastructure, the standards, and the financing relationships run through Beijing rather than Washington.