下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Chinese people have a historical claim to the Silk Road, as China was where the route originated and gave rise to the convergence and dissemination of Eastern and Western cultures– a confluence that would offer later generations a model for mutually beneficial cooperation. The seeds of such a peace were sown in the Ming Dynasty, when Chinese explorer Zheng He set off on his famous seven voyages, leaving a sense of friendly relations with the 30 plus countries he encountered along his route. In early modern times, however, China was isolationist in its attitude and overly confident in its own abilities. Our ancestors suffered a setback, and the country had to taste the bitter consequences of its "closed-door policy", which ultimately led to China’s poverty, lack of development, ignorance, and near demise.
After the founding of the PRC, and since the beginning of reform and opening up, China’s road has become ever wider. It has given the Chinese people a valuable lesson–the road to success cannot be built with an isolationist or reactionary mindset. China will only be understood by other nations if it engages with the world, which will in turn lead to mutual development and "win-win" results for both sides.
As it has progressed along its path, China has gone from setting up Special Economic Zones to opening up coastal cities, river regions, and border areas, and eventually implementing all-around opening up. It has seen the successful conclusion of the APEC meeting and its own accession to the WTO. Through attracting foreign investment and doing business overseas, the country’s road to opening up is getting more spacious. As the pace of this process gets faster, the road is having a far-reaching influence around the world.
Today, China is taking heed of history’s lessons and its own experience. It is following the global consensus in conforming to the wishes and expectations of the rest of the world, and it is proposing the "Belt and Road Initiative" to widen China’s path to development and create a better future for humanity. This is the beginning of a new chapter for China’s road in the new era.
“China should not only tend to itself and live its own life. The country should also help other countries and nations, as well as bring benefits to the rest of the world.” China’s Belt and Road Initiative will not only create the favorable conditions for China’s development, it will also bring benefits to the people living in the areas along the routes. In essence, the Belt and Road Initiative is a path towards peace, prosperity, openness, innovation and culture. The initiative is aimed at creating dialogue and partnerships of non-alignment, with a focus on addressing the key question of development. It also has the objective of resolving issues of unequal global development, problems in governance, technological gaps, and uneven distribution. As such, it offers a new model for exploring global economic governance.
The ancient routes known as the Silk Road went across both land and sea. The land route was founded during the Han Dynasty when Emperor Wu sent Zhang Qian as an envoy to the Western Regions, an area that is now in modern-day Xinjiang and its surrounding lands. Zhang Qian’s original mission had been to unite China and the Greater Rouzhi tribe against the Xiongnu. However, he also happened to pull off the miraculous feat of opening up a route to Eurasia for commercial trade. The establishment of the new land route between China and the West made sustained contact between the two regions possible. It allowed China to forge trade relationships and begin official exchanges with central and western Asia, as well as with Rome in the Mediterranean region. In contrast, the sea route, known as the Maritime Silk Road, had its origins in the Qin and Han dynasties and flourished during the Tang and Song dynasties. The route was a sea passage that enabled the transport of goods and cultural exchanges between ancient China and countries overseas. Zheng He’s fleet crossed the Western Seas on this route during the explorer’s seven voyages. China’s porcelain, tea, Western spices, and other goods were also traded by way of the Maritime Silk Road.
The key to the Belt and Road Initiative’s engagement of the countries in question is that it offers a new road of cooperation for the rest of the world and is committed to solving the common problems affecting human society, as well as to bringing change to the world economy.
A traditional Chinese saying states that wealth comes from building roads, and only when the roads are accessible can there be economic development. Many countries and regions have achieved "historic firsts" through their participation in the Belt and Road Initiative. The largest inland country, Kazakhstan, has gained its own sea passage for the first time. East Africa now has its first expressway; the Maldives has its first sea bridge, while Belarus has established its own car manufacturing industry for the first time. The China-Laos Railway will mean Laos can realize its dream of becoming a connected country, rather than a landlocked one, and enter a new era of national development supported by rail.
The Belt and Road Initiative is the "path to riches" that many nations can follow to their mutual benefit, and it is now ready to take flight on its own two wings. Moreover, the project is based on the cooperation of the "Six Corridors and Six Channels" and "Multiple Countries and Multiple Ports", which has brought life to participating nations.
In 2019, the Second Beilun River Bridge, connecting China’s city of Dongxing to Vietnam’s Mong Cai, was officially opened. In the same year, a new railway tunnel measuring 6,453.5 meters on the China-Laos Railway was put into operation, while in Moscow, employees from the China Railway Construction Corporation worked on a tunnel connecting Prospekt Vernadskogo Station and Michurinsky Prospekt Station on the metro’s "Third Interchange Contour".Chongqing and India were connected by the International Land-Sea Trade Corridor. Japanese Goods were loaded onto a train in Xiamen destined for Central Europe and arrived in Duisburg, Germany.
Over the past six years, several projects have flourished, such as the aforementioned China-Laos Railway, China-Thailand Railway, Jakarta-Bandung High-speed Railway, and Hungary-Serbia Railway. There has been solid progress on port projects, such as those at Gwadar, Hambantota, Piraeus, and Halifax. Moreover, energy projects, such as the crude oil pipeline in Russia, China-Central gas pipeline, and eastern Sino-Russian gas pipeline, have moved steadily forward. Whether roads and railways, sea and sky, or oil and gas lines and telecommunications, China’s four-way network on land, sea, sky, and cyberspace along the Belt and Road countries has begun to take shape.
In Central Asia, work on the second thermal power plant in Tajikstan’s Dushanbe was successfully completed with China’s help. The new plant meant that enough energy could be provided to meet the heating and other needs of more than 700,000 residents around the capital city during winter.
In Africa, the Jushi Egypt Fiberglass Industry was established in Egypt in the Suez Economic Zone by Chinese companies. With the plant’s annual production capacity at 200,000 tons of glass fiber, Egypt has become the world’s third-largest producer of the material. In Kenya, a new railway line built by Chinese companies to connect the capital of Nairobi to the port city of Mombasa has become known as the country’s "project of the century".
In Europe, once Chinese companies had taken over operations at the Greek port of Pireus, the throughput of global containers increased to such a point that the port went from being ranked 93rd worldwide in 2010 to 36th, making it one of the fastest-growing container ports in the world.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, running 3,000 kilometers, can be seen as the first act of the Belt and Road Initiative. The construction of this corridor comprises many infrastructure projects that are designed to benefit nearly 3 billion people once they are completed.
The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, measuring more than 750 kilometers, is the longest multinational electric railway in Africa. The railway has proved popular with locals, who have been falling over themselves to praise China. The railway has connected inland regions to the sea, which has brought the goal of Africa’s integration one step closer.
“A single flower does not make spring, while one hundred flowers in full blossom bring spring to the garden.” The basic principles of the Belt and Road Initiative are dialogue, cooperation, and sharing. The key pillar of the initiative is strengthening cooperation on policy, infrastructure, trade, financial, and people-to-people connectivity, with an aim to break new ground in pursuing opening up on all fronts, and fully motivate the enthusiasm of those countries along its routes.
The "Belt and Road" originated in China, where it emerged through practice. However, it belongs to the whole world and can bring benefits to humanity. Since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has worked with the nations along its routes to bring the project into being and create a model for development and prosperity.
Under China’s initiative, new policies and development strategies of many countries and regions have been coordinated and connected. These include the Eurasian Economic Union, the UK’s "Northern Powerhouse", the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025, Vietnam’s"Two Corridors and One Economic Belt", Kazakhstan’s"Bright Road", Turkey’s "Middle Corridor", Mongolia’s"Development Road", and Poland’s "Amber Road". The countries’ development strategies and policies have produced initial results. There are now greater common interests between these nations, while the desire for cooperation among them is also growing.
Between 2013 and 2018, the total trade volume of goods between China and the countries in the Belt and Road Initiative exceeded US$6 trillion. Chinese enterprises made more than US$90 billion in direct investments to member countries. Moreover, 82 economic and trade development zones with a total investment of more than US$28 billion have been created. This has meant that 6,000 enterprises and projects have been put into operation and have created more than 240,000 jobs for the people of those regions.
As for infrastructure and increased connectivity, China-Europe railway lines connected 108 cities in 16 countries across Asia and Europe as of 2018. These transportation lines have seen more than 13,000 freight trains and transported more than 1.1 million TEU of goods. The Belt and Road Initiative has made progress on cooperation between ports, air transportation, and the construction of communication channels.
In terms of culture and education, China has established the "Silk Road" Government Scholarship Program. As of 2017,38,700 students from member countries had gone to China to study on scholarships. China also has 153 Confucius Institutes and 149 Confucius Classrooms across the Belt and Road region. There is also cooperation on many kinds of cultural exchange activities, such as art shows, film festivals, and exhibitions on traditional artifacts–all of which promote cross cultural understanding.
In addition, China has increased cooperation with these countries on tourism, health, disaster relief, and poverty alleviation, which has brought tangible benefits to local people.
When the world is doing well, then China is too. And if China is doing well, then it is even better for the rest of the world. To face the future and expand the international cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, China needs to increase trade and investment cooperation, promote infrastructure interconnectivity, increase openness and cooperation in building innovation capacity, and strengthen cooperation on global economic governance.
Xi Jinping made an appeal by saying, "History is made by the bold. Let us be confident, take action, and work together towards the future!" China is now playing an increasingly important leading role in global governance, which means that the Chinese Dream and the world’s dream will be closely intertwined.