Little-known story of China’s grand project for global boom

The scale of the Road and Belt initiative proposed and launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 is staggering - $4 trillion to be spent on projects covering 65 countries and intended to create hundreds of thousands of jobs! But then the Chinese are not known for thinking and executing small-scale projects.

President Xi was inspired by the possibility of recreating the prosperity, and rekindling the trade and development that thrived along the Silk Trade Road and the Mercantile Belt that stretched over water from China’s Quanzhou City to the Dutch city of Rotterdam and over land from the city of Louyang in China to the port of Hamburg in Germany.

So far, a host of agreements and contracts have been signed as part of the Road and Belt initiative - notable among them a deal allowing a goods train service between China and Poland; and a comprehensive agreement involving 23 countries in the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

The mega-SGR project in Kenya is part of this initiative.

Last week, more than 200 senior media professionals from 110 countries met in Beijing to discuss the Road and Belt initiative with the general consensus being that it was a historic inspiration that drew people together with the common purpose of reducing poverty, creating employment, connecting people and celebrating diversity.

COMMON SUSPICION

Discarding for a moment the common suspicion that every global initiative by the Chinese must be inspired by some nefarious objective of dominating the ‘free’ world, one must applaud the courage of President Xi to come up with such a grand idea at a time when general global sentiment is turning inward, away from globalisation and international inclusiveness.

Indeed, this point was made at the Beijing caucus by Mr David Merrit, the Executive Editor of the Asia Pacific Bloomberg News, and found resonance among the delegates.

The chairman of Egypt’s Al-Ahram, Mr Ahmed El Sayed, saw in the initiative a welcome reassurance that not all super-power driven initiatives were hegemonic in nature, taking a swipe at the US-driven initiatives that saw regimes fall in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia and generally destabilised the Middle East.

Representing Africa, I made the point that while China’s role as a development partner becomes more prominent by the day, the Road and Belt Initiative was not a top-of-mind concept at all in the continent, even if it was in its fourth year of implementation.

We know China primarily as a giver of bilaterally negotiated loans used to build bridges, railways, roads and energy projects.

My comments amplified the role of media in giving prominence to stories such as the Belt and Road one, but, equally, the inadequacy of the information flow from the central units coordinating the implementation of such projects to the media platforms in the countries involved in the Road and Belt initiative.

DIVERSE CULTURES

We made the point that the framers of such initiatives must always think through the ‘soft content’ of such initiatives because this is what was critical for communicating.

The existence of bridges and railways and roads can never be an end in itself. These projects must be brought alive in the imaginations and consciences of the people they are intended to serve.

Devoid of such a link, they end up being perceived as projects between Chinese elites and their counterparts in receiving countries, quite often laced with whiffs of underhand deals.

Mr Liu Yunshan, a ranking member of the CPC Central Committee, asked the media to help disseminate the correct message about the Road and Belt - that it was really pro-people’s development, that it celebrated diverse cultures and that it was strongly pro-globalisation.

This is a good story that the media will be happy to tell. But the onus of foregrounding it as the thread that ties together the diverse range of initiatives around the world, rests squarely with the Chinese authorities.

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