A look at Malaysia’s 400-mile railway being built by China’s Belt and Road plan

An unfinished bus terminal that will be joined with the East Coast Rail Link in Malaysia.

Emily Feng/NPR

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Just north of Malaysia’s capital, lush forest gives way to dirt roads, where workers from Bangladesh and Indonesia rumble past in trucks emblazoned with four Cs — for China Communications Construction Co. They’re blasting a more than 8-mile-long tunnel out of solid bedrock.

The tunnel represents a feat of engineering at the heart of the East Coast Rail Link, a project to lay down more than 400 miles of train tracks connecting shipping ports on Malaysia’s east and west coasts, which is the country’s priciest infrastructure project to date.

But the rail link has blown past deadlines and budgets, and now also symbolizes something more: the travails of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a vast portfolio of overseas infrastructure investments that Chinese leader Xi Jinping launched a decade ago.

The BRI is underpinned by Chinese state financing and employs Chinese state contractors to build ports, roads and bridges largely in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which cannot finance such projects on their own.

But like the Malaysia project itself, Belt and Road is mired in debt. The Rhodium Group, a research firm in New York, estimates more than $78 billion of loans Chinese companies have distributed worldwide through Belt and Road have no hope of being repaid.

It’s successful by comparison

Malaysia is a multiethnic nation of more than 33 million people that borders Singapore, Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia. It’s one of the top 10 Belt and Road destinations by investment amount, with some of the initiative’s most grandiose and…