China tried but didn’t make it, opines British financial writer Matthew Lynn, who advises that “financial power is no substitute for the real thing.” The real thing is coercive force (Washington Post, February 23, 2026).
The thesis strikes me as a oddly framed because, after all, “financial power” is hardly the only front on which the Chinese Communist Party is actively and often enough coercively seeking to subject others to itself, whether via surveillance, censorship, imprisonment and murder at home, gray-zone bullying in and around the South China Sea, or transnational repression in lands far away—a non-exhaustive list.
Belt and Road
Lynn is talking about the Belt and Road Initiative, which, “Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping…aimed to connect the world through cheap loans and equity partnerships that spanned the world.” Lynn says that if the debt traps laid by Beijing’s debt-trap diplomacy were indeed intended as debt traps—for some reason he is coyly agnostic about this motive—they are not trapping and subjugating as planned.
With soft loans, easy credit and plenty of technical expertise, China would gradually take control of the arteries of the global economy. If anyone complained, it could simply switch off the credit and bankrupt the country, or close down the trade routes.
We can all debate whether that was really true, or whether, as Beijing’s apologists liked to claim, it just happened to think that railways and shipping terminals in Asia, Africa and Latin America were really good investments. Either way, there is now a more important point. Its power was far more fragile than it first appeared.
China’s geopolitical ambitions have suffered a whole series of setbacks. The courts in Panama have ruled against Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison owning the ports at either side of the crucial canal through which at least 40 percent of U.S. shipping flows. Following the arrest of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro its investment in the Latin American state looks far less valuable. Iran? You wouldn’t describe any investment in the country as rock-solid right now. Italy scaled down its agreements with China in 2023. The more than $23 billion it has pumped into Argentina probably won’t secure any special favors from President Javier Milei: He hates Marxists almost as much as he loves chainsaws. The list goes on and on. China has spent an estimated $1.5 trillion on its Belt and Road strategy, a huge sum of money for what is still basically a developing economy.
Sounds like some people have realized what Xi and the PRC have been up to with Belt and Road and have stopped cooperating. Or as Lynn puts it, “financial and commercial power has its limits.”
The author then concludes with an assertion that hardly encapsulates the whole story either: “It is only hard power that counts for anything.” If this were true, what would be the point of writing columns—or flooding the world with propaganda? A lot of things count for something. And the hard power also has sources, conditions, cofactors, limits, and complexities. Beware of ending articles with aphorisms.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: “Is America Being Belted by Belt and Road?”
StoptheCCP.org: “The Failure and Success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative”
StoptheCCP.org: “Pulling Off the Belt and Road”
