Name: Charles Onunaiju, Director, Centre for China Studies (CCS), Nigeria

Title: The Belt and Road Initiative as Catalyst for Win-Win Co-Operation and Community of Shared Destiny

Abstract:

Both in its scope and ambition, the Belt and Road Initiative is a watershed in mankind’s search for a framework of co-operation in which the struggle for common needs finds accommodation to the diversities of humanity. It recognizes the general and common desire for a better life and acknowledges the diverse values and unique sensibilities, from which each patch of the earth is derived, nourished and thrived. It follows the contours of early contacts, through which China shared with neighbors and partners engagement in mutual commerce, trade dialogue, extending their worldviews and view points beyond the enclosures of their immediate domain.

In recognizing these ancient routes of civilization interactions that have earlier lifted the content and quality of humanity, President Xi Jinping outlined more ambitious global roadmap and framework of far more sophisticated engagements in which ideas, cultures, goods and services would be diffused in a community of shared destiny through seamless interconnectivity facilitated by elaborate networks of overland and maritime infrastructures.

President Xi Jinping has outlined the strategic vision that China and Central Asia should co-operate to build a Silk Road economic belt during a speech in a university in Kazakhstan in September, 2013.

A month later, he proposed in a speech in Indonesia’s parliament, a construction of 21st century maritime Silk Road to promote maritime co-operation. Additionally he called for the establishment of Asia infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) as compliments to the two projects of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Since the announcement of the strategic vision, it has quickly gone from the drawing board to a grand strategy of strategic network of infrastructure projects, some partly concluded and others at various stages of progress. In as much as there is no single strategy or country that can change the world, it is clear that the Belt and Road Initiative is China’s major attempt to help change the world economic order. There are obvious dangers and many risks in the strategy as it is well known that the Belt and Road area includes many developing countries with high risks economically, politically, socially and in other ways. However, for any country to develop economically it would need the infrastructure, the capital, technology and the market, and China is offering itself as part of the solution. A glimpse at the Belt and Road framework and the scope it traverse means that the population, GDP and trade covered are thrice or more the size of China.

Therefore, if just half of the Belt and Road areas take up the growth momentum and repeats what China has done over the past 30 years, the world will be very different in the next 30 years. Already documents released so far on the Belt and Road, indicate that it is not confined or limited to old Silk Road areas. The global perspective of the initiative holds out enormous prospects for a radical change of the global economic order. In this respect, what is new, versus the old, is that the world’s economic landscape has changed so much since the Second World War. But many of the world’s multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International monetary Fund or the world trade organization, remain very much the same as they were, some 50 to 70 years ago. They need to change and something is needed to stimulate that change. The Belt and Road and the China-led Asian infrastructure and investment Bank, (AIIB) comes readily into the picture.

For many developing countries, especially in Africa where the infrastructure deficit has considerably hampered visions of sustainable and inclusive growth, the initiative offers a fresh vista to overcome the bottleneck of lack of infrastructure and paucity of funding in tackling the key challenges to sustainable development of win-win cooperation. China’s deepening and broad involvement in Africa provides the material momentum for accelerating the creation of a community of shared destiny.

Within the context of the Belt and Road project, a vision of people to people contacts underwritten by a network of infrastructural linkages would blossom, driving a cultural diffusion in which humanity would increasingly look like a beautiful garden where flowers of different colors and shapes bloom.

The Belt and Road Initiative is outstandingly China’s 21st century great contribution to humanity. So far, the scheme has not manifested the geo-political and security calculations implicit in America’s postwar Marshal Plan, in which Washington’s generous financial provision for the recovery of war-ravaged Europe was accompanied with elaborate geo-political and security ramification that locked the continent and beyond, and into U.S national security interest.

The Belt and Road Initiative is an open, participatory and inclusive framework of broad co-operation that would enhance the structural roadmap of unimpeded trade, mutual sharing and learning of technology and culture in a free exchange of mutual interaction. The Belt and Road Initiative is the first unremitting and persistent effort to construct the material condition of mankind long-cherished desire to learn and cooperate with each other, in spite of the diverse geographical divides. It fulfills the outstanding vision of early Chinese leaders, that when China secures its own fortune, it will share the fruits with the rest of humanity.

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