Carbis Bay (UK), 13 June 2021 (France24/BBC/AlJazeera)

The G7 summit in the resort of Carbis Bay in Cornwall, in the south-west of England, has seen the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the US and UK gather in person for the first time since the pandemic.

Leaders of the world's largest economies unveiled an infrastructure plan Saturday for the developing world to compete with China’s global initiatives, but there was no immediate consensus on how forcefully to call out Beijing over human rights abuses.

The Group of Seven (G7) nations have unveiled a significant infrastructure initiative for lower-income countries in a bid to counter China’s multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, dubbed the “New Silk Road”.

Promising to “collectively catalyse” hundreds of billions in infrastructure investments for low- and middle-income countries, the G7 leaders said on Saturday that they would offer a “values-driven, high-standard and transparent” partnership.

“Build Back Better World” (B3W) project, championed by US President Joe Biden’s administration, is aimed squarely at competing with the Belt and Road initiative, which has been widely criticised for saddling small countries with unmanageable debt.

Citing China for its forced labor practices is part of President Joe Biden ’s campaign to persuade fellow democratic leaders to present a more unified front to compete economically with Beijing. But while they agreed to work toward competing against China, there was less unity on how adversarial a public position the group should take.

Canada, the United Kingdom and France largely endorsed Biden's position, while Germany, Italy and the European Union showed more hesitancy during Saturday's first session of the Group of Seven summit, according to a senior Biden administration official. The official who briefed reporters was not authorized to publicly discuss the private meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In his first summit as president, Biden made a point of carving out one-on-one-time with the leaders, bouncing from French president Emmanuel Macron to German chancellor Angela Merkel to Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, a day after meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as if to personally try to ward off memories of the chaos that his predecessor would often bring to these gatherings.

Macron told Biden that collaboration was needed on a range of issues and told the American president that “it’s great to have a U.S. president part of the club and very willing to cooperate.” Relations between the allies had become strained during the four years of Donald Trump's presidency and his “America first” foreign policy.