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By Robert Lawrence Kuhn
The Belt-and-Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s grand global vision that he first put forth in 2013, is short for: the Silk Road Economic Belt over land, engaging Central Asia and linking Europe with China, and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road over water, through which China reaches out to countries in Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe. Many people are energized; some are anxious. All can benefit from understanding President Xi’s strategic initiative to engage some 70 countries, most of them developing countries, providing much-need infrastructure and solidifying China’s global economic integration. Let’s do a five-year “check-up”: discern what has been accomplished, what problems have been encountered, what challenges lie ahead. We focus first on how Belt-and-Road affects China’s domestic development. Too often, Chinese officials, with all good intent, emphasize how much Belt-and-Road benefits developing countries – which it surely does – but they do not even mention how Belt-and-Road benefits China. This raises suspicions. After all, Belt-and-Road is business and geopolitics, not charity and foreign aid. So, does Belt-and-Road benefit China? Which areas and sectors are engaged? What are the opportunities? What are the obstacles? We investigate China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative, to be….
Staff members are loading up a China-Europe freight train at a logistics center in Urumqi on August 13, 2018.
Staff members are loading up a China-Europe freight train at a logistics center in Urumqi on August 13, 2018.
The Belt-and-Road Initiative empowers less-developed countries, and enhances regional connectivity, thus facilitating world stability and common prosperity. China’s expertise in constructing infrastructure — roads, railways, ports, pipelines, power plants, public telecommunications, and the like — enables global development, exemplifying what President Xi Jinping calls an international community with a shared future for all humanity. That’s why China should be sensitive to challenges that Belt-and-Road faces. One is that China has a ‘hidden agenda’ or ‘secret motivations’, a misguided sense that is inadvertently reinforced when Chinese officials speak only about the benefits to host countries and not about the benefits to China itself. President Xi Jinping famously calls for Win-Win in international affairs, and indeed mutual benefits are required to assure sustainability. And sustainability of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is essential, because inequality and poverty remain the world’s most severe and intractable problems, which is why all people of goodwill should root for its success. That’s Closer To China.