The Belt and Road initiative : opportunities and challenges

Abstract

This paper begins by setting out the vision for the renaissance of the New Silk Road as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013 and picks out a theme of moral leadership in Xi’s speeches. The opportunities for a Chinese approach to the Common Good are contrasted with six major challenges to Xi’s aspirations for the BRI as a pathway leading to friendship, shared development and peace. The Silk Road has a rich history across Asian civilisations with earliest records of it dating from the Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE). Over the centuries, the Silk Road has not only opened up a path for trade with silk as currency but also great opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and relations. The Silk Road has provided a means for the transmission of art, science and cultural and religious exchange. The BRI essentially promotes a regenerated Silk Road of infrastructural connectivity within and across China’s borders. It brings together the “Silk Road Economic Belt” of roads, railways and industrial corridors and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” expanding through upgraded ports. The BRI extends beyond ports, railways and highways to other major types of infrastructure including oil and gas pipelines, electricity power plants and telecommunications networks. Construction of the $68 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor creates a major highway running from the deep-water port of Gwadar in Pakistan to the city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang region of China, improving connectivity between the two countries and offering central and western China more direct access to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Projects are also underway in several of the other corridors. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has pointed out, the BRI is “more of a sweeping vision” than “an operational blueprint,” though it is far more credible and tangible than sceptics might like to believe (Johnson, 2016). A starting point for this enquiry inevitably begins with the plans originally set out by President Xi Jinping and China’s State Council in 2015. This paper aims to report Xi’s comments as an observer rather than as a critic following Watson (1994) to overcome externally imposed meaning and to appreciate other people’s realities.