From Next Big Future:
There are 900 deals under way on China's One Belt One Road initiative.
The deals are worth $890 billion, such as a gas pipeline from the Bay
of Bengal through Myanmar to south-west China and a rail link between
Beijing and Duisburg, a transport hub in Germany. China says it will
invest a cumulative $4 trillion in OBOR countries, though it does not
say by when. Its officials tetchily reject comparison with the Marshall
Plan which, they say, was a means of rewarding America’s friends and
excluding its enemies after the second world war. OBOR, they boast, is
open to all. But, for what it is worth, the Marshall Plan amounted to
$130 billion in current dollars.
President Xi’s chief foreign adviser, Yang Jiechi, has tied OBOR to
China’s much-touted aims of becoming a “moderately well-off society” by
2020 and a “strong, prosperous” one by mid-century.
Mr Xi seems to see the new Silk Road as a way of extending China’s
commercial tentacles and soft power. It also plays a role in his broader
foreign-policy thinking. The president has endorsed his predecessors’
view that China faces a “period of strategic opportunity” up to 2020,
meaning it can take advantage of a mostly benign security environment to
achieve its aim of strengthening its global power without causing
conflict. OBOR, officials believe, is a good way of packaging such a
strategy. It also fits with Mr Xi’s “Chinese dream” of recreating a
great past. It is not too much to say that he expects to be judged as a
leader partly on how well he fulfils OBOR’s goals.
Third, OBOR matters because it is a challenge to the United States and
its traditional way of thinking about world trade. In that view, there
are two main trading blocs, the trans-Atlantic one and the trans-Pacific
one, with Europe in the first, Asia in the second and America the focal
point of each. Two proposed regional trade deals, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership,
embody this approach. But OBOR treats Asia and Europe as a single space,
and China, not the United States, is its focal point.
In April a Chinese shipping company, Cosco, took a 67% stake in Greece’s
second-largest port, Piraeus, from which Chinese firms are building a
high-speed rail network linking the city to Hungary and eventually
Germany. In July work is due to start on the third stage of a
Chinese-designed nuclear reactor in Pakistan, where China recently
announced it would finance a big new highway and put $2 billion into a
coal mine in the Thar desert....MORE
That Economist link is well worth a click.
