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Experts’ take on ‘Belt and Road’ initiative
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WITH its enormous implications for Asian regional integration and prosperity, China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative is eliciting input from experts and scholars from around the world.
Foreign experts and academics discussed the initiative recently during a panel at the sixth World Forum on China Studies, an event held in Shanghai.
The “One Belt, One Road” — also known as “Belt and Road” or OBOR — involves a total of 65 countries that cover huge swaths of land. Given the initiative’s ambitious sprawl, it has been broken down into a number of land- and sea-based economic corridors to improve feasibility, explained Yu Hongsheng, deputy head of the institute of national economy at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Yu told the forum that these corridors originate in China, linking Chinese cities along the way as they extend westward. For instance, the “New Asia-Europe economic corridor” starts in coastal areas of east China’s Jiangsu Province, and then heads west through Kazakhstan, Russia and finally the Baltic countries.
Since sections of such corridors are inside China, it is important to coordinate relationships between domestic cities and overseas stakeholders, said Yu.
In fact, implementing the “Belt and Road” strategy is not necessarily the sole responsibility of central governments. Instead, China’s local authorities can take the initiative to facilitate regional cooperation as well, said professor He Shengda of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. He cited the example of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, which borders Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. The province has signed agreements with these neighboring countries on protecting the Lancang-Mekong River under the ASEAN framework.
Whether undertaken bilaterally or multilaterally, such regional collaborations can achieve synergy and serve as a template for national cooperation between national governments, He claimed. However, he stressed that successful intra-regional cooperation will rest on mutual understanding of each side’s preferences and intentions.
How to improve
This is where, in his opinion, China’s think tanks and academics should come in with country-specific research regarding neighboring countries’ development plans for the next five to 10 years. “China needs to know much more about its partners in carrying out the OBOR. I see a weakness in this regard,” He asserted.
This weakness was also pointed out by Mohammed Saqib, Secretary-General at the India China Economic and Cultural Council. Saqib foresees a bigger role for the media, since to date publicity of OBOR has been “insufficient” in countries that are supposedly its beneficiaries. According to Saqib, not much about OBOR is known in India apart from information released by the Chinese diplomatic mission there.
A visiting scholar at Shanghai International Studies University’s Middle East Studies Institute, Gaafar Karar Ahmed suggested that China join Western countries in setting up more cultural centers in the Arab world and in the meantime allow for similar Arab centers to be opened in Beijing.
“The main idea behind building the ‘Belt and Road’ is that we have to bring nations together, especially young women and men,” said Ahmed.
As a longtime watcher of Sino-Arab relations, Ahmed spoke highly of the “Belt and Road” and called upon Arab nations to come aboard. “They need to work seriously to be part of this ‘Belt and Road’ for it is the most important collective economic opportunity in 500 years,” Ahmed claimed.
He also noted that Arab countries need to fulfill their own share of obligations to make the initiative better known in the Persian Gulf.
For instance, in building modern infrastructure, Arabs can benefit from international financial institutions like the newly established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund, both of which were started by Chinese authorities to provide funding to OBOR-related projects.
Ambitious as it is, implementation of OBOR is likely to meet with multiple challenges — including many related to security. It is therefore in China’s best interest to contribute to the peaceful resolution of the ongoing violence in the Middle East, since “an atmosphere of chaos and conflicts” would only delay progress on the initiative, warned Ahmed.
To many observers, OBOR is both a Chinese exercise in spearheading global economic governance and an unprecedented attempt at building institutions that will enhance the country’s ability to set the agenda in global affairs.
One of this argument’s proponents is Makoto Taniguchi, Japan’s former ambassador to the United Nations. Taniguchi has also previously worked with institutions like the OECD.
He is supportive of OBOR and construction of such auxiliary institutions as the AIIB because given his rich global experience, “Westerners often don’t really understand Asia’s developmental problems.”
And with economic giants like Germany and Great Britain eagerly joining the AIIB as founding members, it was a “serious mistake” for Japan to stay outside, said Taniguchi.
In response to the view that the AIIB is meant as a counterweight to the Asian Development Bank, where Japan holds the presidency, Taniguchi suggested that the two lenders may have different agendas as well as space to cooperate.
“And AIIB will be taken more seriously if it becomes an internationally recognized bank,” he told Shanghai Daily.
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