Around 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping introduced a new catch phrase for how the country would approach foreign aid in the future: small and beautiful.
The term was meant to promote community-based, small-scale, sustainable projects — contrary to the infrastructure projects of the century that China had championed for the last decade, most famously the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI. Crucially, these small projects were also supposed to fund themselves by focusing on profitable and scalable sectors, such as energy, technology, and health care.
Since China launched BRI in 2013, it has spent $1.175 trillion in 149 countries. This has largely been on major infrastructure projects, including $4.7 billion on a railway linking the port city of Mombasa to Nairobi in Kenya and $1.5 billion on a deep-water port to expand Nigeria’s trade capacity. In Asia, it spent $62 billion on an economic corridor between China and Pakistan, $1.3 billion on a port in Sri Lanka, and $3.6 billion on a railway project connecting Dhaka with the Padma Bridge in Bangladesh.
About the author
Jesse Chase-Lubitz
Jesse Chase-Lubitz covers climate change and multilateral development banks for Devex. She previously worked at Nature Magazine, where she received a Pulitzer grant for an investigation into land reclamation. She has written for outlets such as Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and The Japan Times, among others. Jesse holds a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics.
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