Experts' take on 'Belt and Road' initiative
- By Ni Tao
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, November 24, 2015
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The drive [By Zhai Haijun/China.org.cn] |
With its enormous implications for Asian regional integration and prosperity, China's "Belt and 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" Initiative 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.
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