Closer to the Belt & Road Initiative with R.L.Kuhn
POLITICS
By Zhang Ruijun

2017-05-13 22:07 GMT+8

‍By Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn 
The Belt and Road Initiative refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt over land and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road over the seas. It was launched by the Chinese government to promote economic cooperation among participating countries. 
The initiative focuses on infrastructure projects that are jointly built through consultation to meet the interests of all. Belt and Road connectivity projects help align and coordinate the development strategies of participating countries, build market potential, promote investment and consumption, and create demand and job opportunities. 
The human side of the Belt and Road Initiative encourages people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and fosters mutual learning, so that diverse peoples can understand, trust and respect each other, live in peace and harmony, and seek prosperity and fulfillment. 
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The Belt and Road Initiative will succeed to the extent that China’s own developmental principles, which have produced China’s economic miracle, can be applied and adopted by other developing countries. For this reason, I examine President Xi Jinping’s overarching principles for guiding China’s domestic transformation, called “The Five Major Development Concepts” — innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing. How do each of these Five Concepts for domestic development relate to the Belt and Road Initiative for international development? 
1) Innovative Development: large-scale infrastructure projects require structural innovation, especially their financing and investment robustness (Belt and Road projects need to be financially viable; they are not foreign aid). The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), initiated by China to facilitate Belt and Road projects, is itself a major innovation. 
2) Coordinated Development: For each Belt and Road project, diverse components must work together — host country, local government, international project management, international financing, and foreign and domestic construction companies (including foreign and domestic workers and suppliers in balance - to provide needed skills at competitive costs, while not alienating local people and businesses). 
3) Green Development: One danger of the Belt and Road Initiative is that polluting industries from China could be shipped off to developing countries, because developing countries are more concerned about economic development than about environmental protection. But such shortsightedness would be historic myopia. China must apply to others the environmental lessons it learned the hard way. 
4) Open Development: China has shown how a “Spirit of Openness” as well as a policy of “Opening Up” catalysed an economic miracle. Now this same spirit and policy must be inculcated into Belt and Road countries, while respecting local conditions and cultures: what worked in China, if transplanted en masse, will likely not work in other countries. General principles, yes; specific policies, no. The challenge for developing countries is to adapt, not adopt. 
5) Shared Development: Sharing is the essence of the Belt and Road Initiative. It reflects the human spirit and it helps maintain world stability. Inequalities are a primary cause of global instability. Shared development is more a matter of transferring experience than of transferring cash. China has national competence in constructing infrastructure, which it can now share with the developing world.   
Here’s the big picture: Just as the Five Major Development Concepts are transforming China’s society and re-balancing China’s economy, the Belt and Road Initiative can transform the developing world’s infrastructure and re-balance the entire world’s economy.

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