The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s mega-plan for global infrastructure, will transform the lives and work of tens of thousands of researchers.
There are few regions of the developing world where China’s scientific outreach does not have a footprint.
This marks a profound shift in where low- and middle-income countries are drawing scientific support — a sphere in which China is emerging as a competitor to the United States, Japan and the wealthier European nations. And as China rises as a science-development superpower, it brings a different perspective from those of other leading science nations.
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First, there is the concept of win–win that pervades all BRI projects, says Theresa Fallon, director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels. Every major investment brings benefits not only to the host country but also to China, which is hoping to gain both scientifically and economically from the ventures. Another difference is that China sees itself as a more appropriate partner for poorer nations because it still recalls what it was like to be poor, ...
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But there’s another view of China’s scientific rise — the narrative that low- and middle-income countries are sleepwalking into the arms of an authoritarian and neocolonial state, and that everything else, including technology agreements and research alliances, are part of that trajectory. In this narrative, struggling nations are sagging under billions of dollars of debt to China and are giving away the keys to untold amounts of economically valuable and sensitive resources ....
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