China’s ports and railways buy leverage in South Asia, but not control, study finds

When China’s Belt and Road Initiative began pouring concrete across South Asia more than a decade ago, critics warned of a new kind of empire built not with armies but with loans, ports and railways. A research article published in SN Social Sciences by Manjul Mishra and Smita Patel of Banaras Hindu University now offers the most granular answer yet to the question that has haunted the region’s politics: under what conditions does Chinese-backed infrastructure actually translate into strategic leverage, and why has India responded with a connectivity model of its own rather than a unified counter-strategy?

The study, published on 19 August 2026, applies geoeconomic statecraft as its primary theoretical lens, treating infrastructure as an instrument of power politics pursued by economic means. Rather than asking whether the Belt and Road Initiative is good or bad for South Asia, the authors ask a more technical question: which configurations of financing concentration, contractual risk allocation, operating rights, regulatory capacity, recipient-state bargaining and access to alternative partners make economic involvement convertible into political influence? The answer, they find, is that convertibility is rare, conditional and heavily dependent on the domestic institutions of the recipient state.

The clearest case of potential Chinese leverage is Pakistan. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship corridor running from Kashgar to Gwadar, concentrates financing from a single partner, embeds long-term contractual commitments and operates within a Pakistani political system in which the military plays a central role in economic governance. The corridor’s long-term plan through 2030, approved by Pakistan’s Planning Commission, formalises agricultural, industrial and port commitments that extend decades into the future. Yet even here, the study stops short of claiming automatic political control. Citing scholarship on how Pakistan and China negotiate, the authors note that Islamabad retains bargaining agency, and that the corridor’s benefits and risks are contested within Pakistan’s own federal politics, with provincial governments negotiating over route alignments and revenue shares.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port is the second case the study identifies as comparatively favourable for potential leverage, but through a distinct mechanism: long-term commercial operating rights. In 2017, a Chinese state-owned enterprise acquired a 99-year lease on the port in exchange for debt relief, a transaction that CSIS analysis famously characterised as China buying Hambantota. The operating rights give China a commercial foothold in the Indian Ocean that could, in principle, support strategic access. But the study is emphatic that this does not establish military access or political control. Sri Lanka’s government retains regulatory authority over the port’s operations, and the transaction itself has become a cautionary tale about fiscal vulnerability rather than a template for debt-trap diplomacy. The authors align with Deborah Brautigam’s critical analysis of the debt-trap meme and with Chatham House research showing recipient influence on Belt and Road outcomes.

Elsewhere in the region, leverage is far more constrained. Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives present configurations in which implementation is uneven, financing is diversified and governments actively negotiate among competing partners. Bangladesh’s infrastructure portfolio mixes Chinese loans for the Karnaphuli tunnel and the Teesta river project with Japanese financing for the Matarbari power plant, World Bank support for regional connectivity and Asian Development Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank projects for railways and transmission infrastructure. Dhaka’s bargaining position is strengthened by this diversification, and the study documents how Bangladesh has urged China to lower interest rates on loans and reduce the trade gap, while simultaneously signing an $850 million deal with the World Bank in 2025. Bangladesh’s foreign policy, as the study notes through a neoclassical realist lens, is shaped by dilemmas of managing relations with both India and China rather than aligning with either.

Nepal’s case illustrates how a landlocked state uses infrastructure diplomacy to gain sea access without surrendering sovereignty. The 2019 transit transport protocol with China opened a new route to the sea, but Nepal’s implementation of Belt and Road projects remains slow, and the country has simultaneously engaged with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an American grant programme, demonstrating the domestic agency that conditions whether Chinese involvement produces developmental benefits or strategic access. The study cites research on Nepal’s infrastructural rivalries showing how Kathmandu navigates between the BRI and the MCC, retaining regulatory authority and negotiating among partners rather than accepting a single corridor’s terms.

The Maldives presents a third configuration of constrained leverage. Chinese financing built the China–Maldives Friendship Bridge, a landmark project connecting Malé with the airport island, and Chinese loans constitute a significant share of the country’s public debt, as documented by the Auditor General’s Office and the Ministry of Finance. But the study notes that Maldivian governments have alternated between pro-China and pro-India orientations, and that the country’s debt sustainability depends on fiscal management rather than on any single creditor’s terms. The Maldives retains regulatory authority over its ports and airspace, and the study finds no evidence of automatic political control despite the concentration of Chinese financing in specific projects.

India’s response, the study argues, is neither a unified counter-encirclement strategy nor necessarily more effective than Chinese-backed projects. Instead, New Delhi combines sovereignty-based opposition to the BRI, particularly its passage through Pakistan-administered Kashmir, with alternative corridors such as the Chabahar port agreement with Iran and Afghanistan, the Kaladan multi-modal transit facility with Myanmar, and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor announced in 2023. India also pursues coalition finance through partnerships with Japan, the European Union and the United States, maritime public goods through the Information Fusion Centre for the Indian Ocean Region, and geocultural diplomacy through heritage projects such as Project Mausam and Buddhist circuit infrastructure. The study cites Timothy Winter’s concept of geocultural power to characterise how India deploys civilisational narratives alongside infrastructure, competing with China’s own geocultural claims along the Silk Road’s historical geography.

The study’s most significant contribution is conceptual: infrastructure diplomacy is a relational process, not a unilateral instrument. Project design, domestic institutions and recipient-state agency jointly condition whether economic involvement produces developmental benefits, fiscal vulnerability or strategic access. The authors draw on scholarship by Schindler, DiCarlo and Paudel on the rise of the twenty-first-century infrastructure state, and on Flint and Zhu’s geopolitics of connectivity, to argue that infrastructure is not simply a conduit for pre-existing power but a medium through which power is negotiated. This reframing challenges both the debt-trap narrative popular in Western commentary and the triumphalist narrative promoted by Belt and Road advocates, positioning recipient states as active negotiators rather than passive recipients.

The findings arrive at a moment when South Asia’s infrastructure competition is intensifying. China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to expand through new frameworks, including a 2024 Belt and Road cooperation framework with Nepal and a 2025 joint press release with Bangladesh, while India deepens partnerships with France and Italy through joint statements in 2026 and strengthens Quad cooperation on maritime security. The study suggests that the region’s future will be shaped not by a single corridor’s dominance but by the ongoing negotiation among competing infrastructure offers, in which the terms of financing, the allocation of operating rights and the strength of domestic institutions determine whether ports and railways become instruments of leverage or vehicles of development. The authors’ analysis positions South Asian states as sovereign actors with real bargaining power, challenging the assumption that infrastructure competition inevitably produces strategic control, and offering a technical vocabulary for understanding when economic involvement converts into political influence and when it does not.

Subject of Research: Infrastructure diplomacy and uneven strategic leverage in South Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s competitive connectivity

Article Title: Infrastructure diplomacy and uneven strategic leverage in South Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s competitive connectivity

Article References: Mishra, M., & Patel, S. (2026). Infrastructure diplomacy and uneven strategic leverage in South Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s competitive connectivity. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01649-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01649-5

Keywords: Infrastructure, diplomacy, uneven, strategic, leverage, South, Asia, China, Belt, Road, Initiative, India