“It’s going to be harder for host governments over the next year to tout their supposedly close relationship with China as contributing to development.” The map above shows the European based nations that have signed off a China Belt & Road MoU. It is only natural that Italy wants a piece of the pie.You are leaving the website for the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and entering a website for another of Carnegie's global centers.Federiga Bindi was a nonresident scholar in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace working on European politics, EU foreign policy, and transatlantic relations.How the Coronavirus Pandemic Shattered Europe’s Illusions of China 2500 character limit. Fardella and Prodi warn that, should Italy remain outside the BRI, it could miss trade opportunities. Italy is the first G7 country to sign up to China's global investment programme, despite Western concerns. Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes. Developing nations such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Pakistan might be afraid to aggressively tackle the virus for fear of alienating China, research firm Fitch Solutions said in a note on Thursday.“That these countries, which are heavily dependent on China’s patronage, have so far reported zero or just a few confirmed cases, and we believe that this could be attributed to both low access to health care, which is likely to inhibit infection detection, and a desire to avoid antagonizing China by ‘overreacting’ to the outbreak,” Fitch Solutions said.China’s overseas investments were already beginning to tail off and consolidate before the virus brought the country’s industry to a standstill.The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which China's outbound investment has fallen steeply in recent yearsSource: China Global Investment Tracker from the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation*Note: Tracker measures investment and construction projects worth $100 million or more since 2005, and authors note their figures differ from China's official statisticsGoing forward, China could concentrate its BRI programs in fewer countries, working to avoid criticism by making its outbound investment less aggressive and one-sided, said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.Xi could “retrench and advertise more loudly that the BRI is a group effort,” he added. One official involved in BRI planning in Beijing said last week that a failure to stop the virus spreading outside of China would inevitably take a toll on projects.Still, another Chinese official in Beijing said that the impact to key projects remained limited and that significant disruptions were likely to remain an issue only in the short term. Government road and apartment construction projects involving Chinese contractors have slowed down, said Nissanka Wijeratne, secretary general of the Chamber of Construction Industry of Sri Lanka.Chinese workers returning to Port City Colombo have self-quarantined and there have so far been no major delays at the country’s biggest construction site, said Thulci Aluvihare, head of strategy and business development for the project, which is being built by state-owned In China-reliant Sri Lanka, the virus has already disrupted numerous firms*Note: A recent survey of 100 companies asked how much revenue had declined as a result of the coronavirus outbreak The virus may prompt a shift in focus by Chinese firms in the future, according to Arv Sreedhar, Singapore-based executive director at investment firm Atlantic Partners Asia. "Italy's latest move is certainly seen by many as undermining Europe's attempt to withstand, or compete with, China's economic might.