China's Brilliant Moves In World Trade

ASIA

More Than Silk and Spices

Leaders from Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan last month opened the long-awaited, 525-mile-long Baku-Tbilisi-Kars Railway, a crucial link in China’s revival of the ancient Silk Road.

With this new link through the Caucasus, tens of millions of tons of cargo can now be transported between Asia and Europe in as little as two-weeks. It’s just one of many projects China has undertaken in Central Asia and Africa as part of Belt and Road, an almost trillion-dollar investment strategy now enshrined in the Chinese government’s constitution, CNBC reported.

The plan re-conceptualizes the ancient Silk Road trading route between Europe and Asia as a modern transportation network made up of Chinese-funded roads, seaports, railway tracks and airports – even high-speed fiber-optic lines. About 65 countries are already taking part, comprising one-third of global GDP and 60 percent of the world’s population, Oxford Economics reported earlier this year.

But Belt and Road is much more than an infrastructure project, writes international affairs consultant Alex Chance for the Diplomat. It places China at the heart of a rapidly modernizing global ecosystem and envisions a pluralistic approach to globalization.

“Exchange will replace estrangement, mutual learning will replace clashes, and coexistence will replace a sense of superiority,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told reporters at the opening of the Belt and Road forum earlier this year.

While idyllic in nature, the plan has its critics.

The route zig-zags through turbulent, at times violent nations whose governments are prone to misappropriating funds, Bloomberg reported. China is also one of the world’s most notorious violators of human rights.

Even so, Belt and Road could unite one-time foes in a mutually beneficial economic arrangement that could reshape some of the world’s most contentious regions, Forbes reported.

Such hopes for the project are shifting the balance of global influence toward the East. As China grabs at the reins of global leadership with Belt and Road, the United States is losing its grip, Time says.

Washington’s high-profile withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and other global agreements is leaving a vacuum of influence that China is quickly filling with soft power and billions in investments. The Trump administration has largely dismissed Belt and Road’s foreign policy consequences and staying power, Time writes.

But most believe the impact will be huge. They say the new Silk Road is about much more than making sure spices aren’t in short supply.