Reviving the Silk Road has become the common dream of many countries along its route. However, for many generations, the interconnection between Europe and Asia has mainly come about through wars and conquests. Railways provide the technology for connecting Europe and Asia. Several schemes have been put forward but none have yet succeeded. Now the task has been placed on Chin`as shoulders.
The strategy can rebalance the driving forces for economic development. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, China has become the world’s major engine of growth, contributing more than 30 percent. The proposal of the “Belt and Road” strategy is to let other countries and international organizations get on the fast track that China has laid out and share the benefits through cooperation.
Wang Yiwei explained the need to approach the Belt-Road strategy in light of inclusive globalization, or from the perspective of the transformation of Chinese civilization.
An anti-globalization trend has emerged that endorses trade protectionism, isolationism, populism, and extremism. Accordingly, our world stands at a crossroads.
The international community hopes the G20 summit in Hangzhou, East China`s Zhejiang province, will raise global investments and optimize the use of financial mechanisms. And given its framework, the G20 should view the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a boon for stabilizing the faltering world economy.
The success of Belt and Road initiative infrastructure projects partly rests in the way in which budgets and spending are managed, economists explained.
Parag Khanna (Khanna), senior research fellow at the Center on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, has suggested in his new book Connectography that the China-proposed Belt and Road (B&R) initiative is promoting regional integration, which will help reshape the meaning of geography, steering the globe into a new form of integration and unification through supply chains.
Chinese e-commerce services has brought more wealth and opportunities to Kazakhstan and other countries encompassed in China`s Belt and Road Initiative.
Peter Frankopan`s (Frankopan) book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, has been an unexpected hit in the UK, staying on best-seller lists for weeks. What does Frankopan, a historian at Oxford University and director of the Oxford Center for Byzantine Research, think of the Chinese "Belt and Road" initiative? Recently he talked to Global Times (GT) London correspondent Sun Wei about the past, present, and future of global trade.
The Western stratagem seems ingenious enough. Raise trade barriers against China, apply pressure on its exports and undermine the OBOR process over the next two or three years through selective interpretations of a turgid WTO legal codex.
Hong Kong can make a play for B&R`s human capital, to attract and keep the region`s best and brightest. Although Hong Kong`s claim to be Asia`s world city is sometimes disparaged, it nevertheless has little competition.
A senior UN official in charge of development policy analysis told Xinhua that China`s Belt and Road Initiative is conducive to promoting the global efforts to carry out the 2030 Agenda, approved by world leaders in September last year to serve as the blueprint for the world development efforts for the next 15 years.
Countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative must put green development high on their regional cooperation agendas to ensure pollution is managed before, rather than after, think tanks suggested at the Eco Forum Global Annual Conference Guiyang 2016.
The Indian Ocean is a major region that the 21st century maritime Silk Road (MSR) initiative passes through. The 21st century MSR is consistent with China`s maritime power strategy. The strategy is about how to explore, use, protect and manage the ocean peacefully. It involves maritime security, especially the protection of China`s islands in East and South China seas and China`s energy and trade sea lanes. But in general, it is not a military strategy.
The initiative provides significant economic stimuli to the Chinese economy and strengthens friendship for China by funding infrastructure and other projects with OBOR countries.
When Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in a pair of speeches in September and October 2013, it was clear that at the forefront of his mind was the need to further develop China`s links – economic, political and cultural – with the Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) which, along with Russia and China itself, form the membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
China`s Belt and Road Initiative to reconnect countries along the ancient Silk Road through closer economic, trade and cultural ties could expect early harvest, with mutual interests serving as the key driver behind thriving cooperation amid global economic uncertainties.
Covering 4.4 billion people - or 60 percent of the global population - across more than 60 countries and regions, the high-profile Belt and Road (B&R) Initiative has seen more words put into practice.
Even without Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah`s timely reminder in his Sunday blog, most Hong Kong people can still sense the current economic hardship arising from the city`s falling exports, tumbling asset prices and growing unemployment.
China and Europe`s political leaders are in Beijing discussing about future cooperation potential, especially in the green economy and under China`s Belt and Road Initiative.