EU makes late bid to rival China on the Silk Road

More than 3,000 days after President Xi Jinping came up with a plan in 2013 to invest massively in critical infrastructure like railways and harbors that connect China to the rest of the world, EU officials have finally come up with an alternative scheme.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will on Wednesday unveil the European counterblast to Xi's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and explain how the EU will attempt to exert influence along the 21st century version of the Silk Road.
The big idea behind Europe's Global Gateway strategy is to mobilize up to €300 billion in public and private funds by 2027 to finance EU infrastructure projects abroad. That means building next-generation infrastructure such as fiber optic cables, 5G networks and green energy plants in the developing world, while also trying to compete with China on transport facilities, such as highways and airports.
It’s a long-shot as far as games of catch-up go. Even if private investors join in, the EU’s spending plan languishes way beneath what it is estimated China is coughing up, and Beijing has bought its way to influence with first-mover advantage in countries from Greece to Sri Lanka. The EU boasts its main selling point is more transparency and higher environmental standards than China, although that doesn’t always go down well in many of the potential partners, which prefer opaque Chinese deals. [...]
[...] Some are hopeful of a different result this time, as the Belt and Road’s debt-trap model is now better understood. “Instead of making countries an offer they can’t refuse, the EU will make them an offer they won’t want to refuse. That is the biggest difference between Global Gateway and the Belt and Road,” said Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee.