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I'm not sure where this perception comes from or if it's a specifically western blind spot, maybe some wildly out of date leftover stereotype from after the Opium Wars?
But the Belt and Road Initiative did not come from a country totally disinterested in the rest of the world. China is keenly interested in the rest of the world and quite involved in foreign policy. All that foreign policy is blatantly towards China's own ends, not some abstract ideal like "democracy". But they have lots of it. And they will apply lots and lots of pressure across many many miles to make you do what they want.
See my response to Resolute Raven. The most important point:
As to your comment on the abstract ideal of "Democracy", I think you are missing the larger point, which is that this is not about caring about systems of government, but about caring about the people that live in them. I recognize many non-Westerners (and even many Westerners) find it hard to believe that the West genuinely cares about the welfare of non-Westerners, since we have such a... mixed record... when it comes to helping them. But I think the moral concern is genuine, and I think a great deal of meaningful help (more than most critics of the West would admit) has been delivered.
In the end, even our most rapacious acts have probably largely redounded to the benefit of our victims or their descendants (there are, as always, exceptions). Take the institution of slavery in America. It was undoubtedly surpassingly cruel, but also your average African American now earns a higher income than many white Europeans. When you compare this state of affairs to what they might be experiencing if they'd been left to fend for themselves in Africa, this seems vastly better.
Is it deranged to credit ourselves for seeing to the welfare of the descendants of people we kidnapped and enslaved? I don't actually think so. Yes, we were bad enough to enslave Africans. But we also were good enough, eventually, to free them, on our own initiative and at great cost to ourselves. And not only that, but to allow them to remain here, and to include them in our society, and to later give them equal rights, and after that to even make great sacrifices and endless efforts to try to promote their flourishing. The act of enslaving, and all the acts of kindness that came after it, both say something true about how the West is, and I think both of these things are very different than anything you could say about China. I doubt China would have ever taken African slaves at scale because I think it would have been obvious to them African slaves can't be good Chinese. And this is very good, because I also doubt, if China had a large population of the descendants of Africans it had enslaved, it would be nearly so indulgent as the West. I don't know what the Chinese solution would be to a population that committed 6-7 times as much murder as American whites on a per capita basis (I don't even want to know what the ratio would be relative to Han Chinese) but I can promise you it would not be Black Lives Matter. And as shitty as BLM was (both for us and for our black population—see the huge spike in murders with black victims) I think it is to our credit, morally, that we responded that way as opposed to in the way the CPC might have responded. Our kindness may yet be the death of us, but I can't bring myself to wish it away. My preferred solution is for us to become more practical and realistic, not less kind. In short, like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, we need a brain.
Meanwhile, I think China needs a heart: my most ardent wish is that China develops a genuine feeling of moral responsibility for its less accomplished relations in the Global South, ideally while still retaining the pragmatism and effectiveness it possesses today. Maybe this will happen naturally as it gets richer—I have to remind myself that there is still a lot of serious poverty in China, for all the incredible progress they've made on that front. The good news is I don't think the Chinese are genetically incapable of changing: this isn't like asking Somalians to start winning more Fields medals. The issue is largely cultural.
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But China views the other entities the way physicists view black holes - all complexity is hidden and there is only two parameters - mass and spin. China cares only about resources, markets and shipping routes. They don't care about human rights, religion, ethnicity, who exactly is in power as long as it is stable, they are cavalier about things like pollution and whatnot. The only thing they are emotional about is Taiwan.
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