One Belt One Road

In 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a campaign for national rejuvenation. The One Belt One Road initiative, or OBOR, has become the largest infrastructure program in history. Nearly every Chinese province, city, major business, bank, and university have been mobilized to serve it, spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas building ports and railroads, laying fiber cables, and launching satellites. Using a trove of Chinese sources, author Eyck Freymann argues these infrastructure projects are a sideshow. OBOR is primarily a campaign to restore an ancient model in which foreign emissaries paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, offering gifts in exchange for political patronage. Xi sees himself as a sort of modern-day emperor, determined to restore China’s past greatness. Many experts assume that Xi’s nakedly neo-imperial scheme couldn’t possibly work. Freymann shows how wrong they are. China isn’t preying on victims, Freymann argues. It’s attracting willing partners—including Western allies—from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf. Even in countries where OBOR megaprojects fail, Freymann finds that political leaders still want closer ties with China. Freymann tells the monumental story of Xi’s project on the global stage. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies from Malaysia to Greece, Russia to Iran, Freymann pulls back the veil of propaganda about OBOR, giving readers a page-turning world tour of the burgeoning Chinese empire, a guide for understanding China’s motives and tactics, and clear recommendations for how the West can compete.

This book sets out to analyze how the OBOR initiative will influence the world’s geo-political and geo-economic environment, with specific regard to the ‘Belt and Road’ countries and regions. It evaluates what opportunities the OBOR can offer them in light of the constraints they face, paying particular attention to how security issues may keep some nations from fully participating. Questions are also asked about the tension and conflict along the ‘Belt’ and ‘Road’, which, after all takes in the Middle East’s most tumultuous regions, as well as the much disputed South China Sea. Finally, consideration is given as to how the world’s other economic powers will react when the OBOR inevitably brings about capital and resource competitions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Silk Road Economic Belt component of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative at Kazakhstan in 2013. OBOR is a development strategy and framework that focuses on connectivity and cooperation among countries primarily in Eurasia. It consists of two main components, the land-based "Silk Road Economic Belt" (SREB) and ocean-going "Maritime Silk Road" (MSR). This book studies the equilibrium or balance between overland and maritime trade routes of OBOR. This book has two major sections. The interpretive section examines contemporary media narratives related to the OBOR initiative and how contemporary commentators appropriate narratives about historical events related to the maritime Silk Road to interpret current policy agendas and legitimize diplomatic or economic exchanges. In terms of institutional studies, the chapters related to Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will look at the issues facing the Bank in its quest in forming a new world platform for multilateral development financing. The other section, the empirical case study of the publication highlights the fact that Euro-China High Speed Rail (HSR) and Central Asia-China HSR are not viable at the moment as passenger volume is not sufficient to justify the HSR line. This section examines the overland route of the OBOR and looks at recent Chinese HSR history and conventional sub-high speed rail technology development, and identifies technical & economic criteria determining the appropriate technology for a certain line. The chapter in this section will use the developed criteria to analyze the various rail linkage projects currently under study in the OBOR framework, highlight the economic, bureaucratic and geo-political challenges that these projects likely face and lay down conditions that will determine the outcome of these projects.

This book is among the first to systematically analyze and discuss the Chinese government's“One Belt, One Road” initiative to promote infrastructure investment and economic development, bringing together a diverse range of scholars from China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. The book assembles a package of next generation ideas for the patterns of regional trade, investment, infrastructure development, or next steps for the promotion of enhanced policy coordination across the Eurasian continent and strategic implications for EU, Russia and other major powers, introducing innovative ideas about what these countries across belt and road can do together in the eyes of the young generation. This book will be of interest to scholars, economists, and interested observers of the international impact of Chinese development.

China's Belt and Road strategy is acknowledged to be the most ambitious geopolitical initiative of the age. Covering almost seventy countries by land and sea, it will affect every element of global society, from shipping to agriculture, digital economy to tourism, politics to culture. Most importantly, it symbolizes a new phase in China's ambitions as a superpower: to remake the world economy and crown Beijing as the new center of capitalism and globalization. Bruno Maçães traces this extraordinary initiative's history, highlighting its achievements to date, and its staggering complexity. He asks whether Belt and Road is about more than power projection and profit. Might it herald a new set of universal political values, to rival those of the West? Is it, in fact, the story of the century?

This book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is refracted through relations with third parties. The volume brings together scholars from China and Europe in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, EU studies, and strategic communication. The empirical focus cuts across policy, publics and media, and across history, political economy and diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the other policy areas addressed in the chapters, offers ways for people in Europe and China to get to know one another in new ways, and for the EU and its member states and the Chinese state to forge new partnerships.

China's new initiative of One Belt One Road (OBOR) is attracting global attention for its grand scale of potentially connecting Asia, Africa, Europe (and South America) through the much needed infrastructure projects. This volume explores the major ideas, initiatives, programmes and components of the OBOR, and examines the responses and perceptions of various countries to the OBOR initiative.