Since its introduction, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has received a lot of attention internationally, and China has splurged massively to advance this strategic initiative. He Lifeng, Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at the Davos Forum in the summer of 2018 that from 2013 to now, China's imports and exports with the BRI countries totalled nearly USD $6 trillion, and investment in these countries has exceeded USD $80 billion, including the establishment of 82 economic and trade cooperation zones in the countries participating in the BRI. According to incomplete statistics, more than 240,000 jobs have been created, and nearly 4,000 enterprises have been opened, started, and put into production. Foreign investment in China is estimated to be higher. According to Moody's reports, as of the end of 2016, the financial support provided by China's domestic financial institutions for the BRI project has exceeded USD $750 billion, far exceeding the scale of financing of the international financial institutions for BRI.

With the advancement of the BRI and the rise of the anti-globalization wave in the world, the international criticism of the BRI is increasing. The more concentrated accusation is that China is engaging in "creditor imperialism". This concept, first mentioned by Indian scholars in 2017 represents the view of many countries, that China's loans in pledges such as natural resources and strategic locations in Sri Lanka and Djibouti have caused a large amount of debt in countries receiving its loans. These countries have to "transfer" part of their sovereignty to China when they are unable to pay their loans. In response to China's BRI, the United States and India have jointly strengthened the Indo-Pacific Strategy and attempted to integrate the Indian Ocean region into the East Asia strategy of the United States. This change in the geostrategic thinking of the United States is, to a certain extent, aimed at the BRI.

Despite China's huge investment in BRI countries' construction, why is it increasingly being questioned in the West and in some emerging countries?

This requires a geopolitical perspective to find the cause. The classic geopolitical scholar Halford Mackinder proposed in the book The Geographical Pivot of History that the Earth can be divided into three different plate areas, namely the world island, offshore islands and outlying island. Mackinder believes that to become the world's hegemon, it would be the priority to control the heartland of the world island, from the Volga River to the Yangtze River of the Eurasian region. Although Mackinder's views on the heartland have certain historical limitations, this idea has a great impact on international geopolitical thinking and decision-making. The Grand Chessboard, major work on geopolitics, written by the international relations scholar and President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, is based on Mackinder's theory.

Brzezinski's Cold War strategic suggestion is that the United States should maintain its fundamental interests on the three fronts of Europe, Near East, and the Far East in the form of offshore balancing. The key to achieving offshore balancing lies in the selective "divide and rule". Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan would be its fulcrum of the Near East that limited Russia's southward to the heartland, and could be part of potential Western strategy after the rise of China in the future. Turkey and Ukraine would be its fulcrum in Europe to be the sea and land paths of the United States and its Western allies into the heartland, while acting as a bridgehead to prevent Russia getting into the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and to limit the impact of the Islamic world on the Near East. Brzezinski originally hoped to establish the Far Eastern Anchor led by the three countries China, Japan and South Korea in the Far East, but China's democratization process was not as expected and had disrupted this idea. During the Obama era, the United States developed the pivot strategy in the Asia-Pacific region, joining Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and India to limit China's land rights and sea power development.

Wilson Chan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong believes that the West view the BRI from the perspective of geopolitical strategy; this is an important reason why the BRI has been increasingly questioned. In fact, if the BRI is a geostrategic strategy, China would not be the sole country that proposes such strategy. India and Japan had jointly proposed the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor; in September 2018, the EU proposed the Connecting Europe & Asia: The EU Strategy; all these are contemporary geopolitical strategies similar to the BRI.

Different from the geo-strategy established in the past which is based on geographical regions, the BRI hopes to use the Silk Road as the theme of regional integration and supports the railway and port infrastructure across Eurasia. In the eyes of the West, this way of emphasizing "linking" and "communication" is, in part, responding to the concept of "divide and rule" of the U.S. since the Cold War and it is to establish a political and economic cooperation pattern led by China. Because of this, although China has repeatedly stressed that the BRI is not a diplomatic tool or a diplomatic tool for China to move toward hegemony, from the Western point of view, the BRI policy fulfils the analysis of the classic geopolitics. When the policy is effective, the West naturally has a layer of political and strategic considerations. Therefore, whether it is the Indo-Pacific Strategy promoted by the United States, the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor proposed by India and Japan, and the Connecting Europe & Asia strategy proposed by Europe can be regarded to some extent as the Western society's respond to the strategic actions of China's BRI strategic move in the world island through the intervention and power of sea power and land rights.

Final analysis conclusion:
Based on its long geopolitical tradition, the West regards the BRI as a new geopolitical strategy proposed by China; this is why the West is wary and suspicious. Because of this rooted tradition, for China to continuously promote the BRI and to seek for new market space in the future, it should make long-term plans for the resistance it will face.