It has been almost eight years yet enormous issues remain around the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing knows them all but, with face saving widely recognized as the imperative of its foreign policy, prefers not to disclose them publicly. In fact, the BRI is not and never has been a strategy, but is an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings.

The story begins with President Xi Jinpings eye-catching proposals to establish a Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in 2013. However, Beijing took more than a year to form its leading groupon the subject, and a year and a half to issue a single BRIguideline, which was full of vague mottos. Even the name was not meticulously drafted, experiencing changes from One Belt, One Road to the Belt and Road Initiative. That said, these fluctuations are consistent with Beijings framing of the BRI as mutually discussed, open, and inclusive.

Unexpectedly, this framing has caused unfettered reinterpretations even within China, and some of them totally contradict the main leadership body, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Some provincial governments simply talk of a bridgehead that alludes vaguely to a sense of growing military power. Other provinces have gone as far as to claim the BRI will restore Chinas historical glory, recalling the ancient tribute system in Southeastern Asia. Some Chinese academicsandmilitary generals decipher the Initiative as a shrewd geopolitical strategy, reinforcing Chinas internal policy discoordination. The NDRCpurportedly has struggled to play down all of these alternative explanations, instead emphasizing economic cooperation and peaceful development.

Beijing explicitly understands the strength of policy narrative and has attempted to control the narrative of the BRI. The leading groupsought to prevent the abuse of the BRI concept. According to the interview cited byJinghan Zeng, scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Science were forbidden to speculate on the meaning and implications of the BRI after 2015.

Nevertheless, the global speculation has gone wild. In addition to the popular stereotype of the BRI as Chinas strategy to achieve Asian supremacy by marginalizing the United States, the BRI has been portrayed variously as a solution to domestic economic and regional security concerns, a new category of economic globalization, the resurrection of the historical Silk Road, or a loose indeterminate scheme that includes all of the above.

So, what is the BRI? Based on the observation of its implementation, Beijings officialstatements, and my research, I would argue it is a constantly changing group of policy settings that encompasses almost all the various clarifications. Arguably, the BRI has been embedded into all other aspects of Chinese domestic policy. In other words, the BRI was first proposed as a grand and extensive policy concept or even a slogan, and was filled in with concrete content afterwards.

Undeniably, China has been attempting to peddle its influence through the BRI. Every country seeks to promote its influence abroad, and China, soon to be the worlds largest economy, has more tools to do so than most. The key question is whether the BRI masks well-thought-out, deceptive tricks for example, the debt trap theory to pursue Beijings regional hegemony insidiously and strategically.

Lee Jones and Shahar Hameirihave stressed that Chinas development financing system is too disjointed and poorly organized to be a well-prepared strategy in the implementation of the BRI. Itsoverseas loanandprojectsare easily influenced by shifting Sino-American relations and the pandemic. The so-called debt diplomacy has been massively exaggerated and overseas asset seizures have rarely occurred, based on findings from theChina Africa Research Initiative,Lowy Institute,andRhodium Group. Recently, even theAtlantic, a US media outlet, admitted this.

Regarding the BRIs sensitive military influence, even former US diplomats and such scholars as Daniel Russel and Blake Bergerhave acknowledged that some of the BRI ports are only commercially designed and almost impossible to be employed militarily. Even after the headline-grabbing lease of Hambantota port in Sri Lanka to a Chinese company, there has been no record of any Chinese military operation in or around Hambantota, as indicated byJones, Hameiri and Jonathan Hillman.

In practice, the piecemeal realization of BRI projects is determined by local governments and their related political and economic interests via diverse and time-consuming bilateral interaction with Beijing. Frankly, the implementation of some BRI projects is messy, chaotic, and beset with vanity and illusion. Even the pro-BRIofficial advisory groupconfessed that the BRI has neither a centralized coordinating mechanism nor a clear set of underpinning work streams.

The BRI is nowadays like a growing adolescent during puberty. It genuinely aims to do things, but rarely contemplate the why and how. Local politicians seize opportunities to promise their voters economic miracles, rarely questioning the utility of proposed infrastructure. Taking BRI projects in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for examples, the three sideshave ambition in abundance but lack clear practical execution. In some extreme cases inSri Lanka, Chinese firms bizarrely finalized the feasibility study for their own proposed projects. Or alternatively, local governments spend little money to assess the projects practicality and its potential market profits, but squander a lot on ceremonies to celebrate half-done projects.

Beijingundoubtedly knows all of the issues surrounding the BRI andmeasureshave possibly been taken to avoid them. Understandably, China prefers not to disclose these publicly, as face saving has been widely recognized as the imperative of its foreign policy, an artifact of its traditional culture.

However, the most important takeaway is this: The BRI is not and never has been a strategy, but instead is an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings. In other words, an initiative, which is the word the world usually misses in its global narratives.

This article was first published in The Diplomat. It has been republished at the request of the author.