The Silk Road – does it not conjure up images of famous and exotic exploits? The travels of Marco Polo from 1271 to 1295 with a land crossing from Venice to Beijing and a sea passage for much of the way back, are recorded in his Travels. On a much larger scale, the great Chinese admiral, Zheng He, commanded seven great naval expeditions between 1405 and 1433, visiting Brunei, Java, Thailand, Southeast Asia, India, the Horn of Africa and Arabia. His first expedition consisted of 317 ships, holding almost 28 000 crew, making the voyages of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus look provincial by comparison.
The Chinese government released in May 2014 the map below indicating the extent of a New Silk Road vision. This map is reproduced below. There is a land based road and a sea based road. The land base road stretches across China, through Central Asia, to northern Iran, Syria and Turkey. From the Bosporus Strait it runs northwest through Europe to Germany and the Netherlands and then south to Venice. The sea based road links Chinese provinces, heads towards the Malacca Strait, then to Kolkata and on to the Kenyan coast, before turning north round the Horn of Africa to Athens and Venice. Together with internal Chinese land routes, the circuit of the two roads together is complete.
In March 2015, the Ministries of Commerce and Foreign Affairs released a document entitled Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Belt and Road.
What does China hope to achieve?
Its 2015 document puts the matter thus:
Countries should work in concert and move towards the objectives of mutual benefit and common security. To be specific, they need to improve the region’s infrastructure, and put in place a secure and efficient network of land, sea and air passages, lifting their connectivity to a higher level; further enhance trade and investment facilitation, establish a network of free trade areas that meet high standards, maintain closer economic ties, and deepen political trust; enhance cultural exchanges; encourage different civilizations to learn from each other and flourish together; and promote mutual understanding, peace and friendship among people of all countries.
The New Silk Road is a broad outline of goals, being filled in with projects as they are developed, and as negotiations with target countries allow. The NSR is not a start-up from scratch, but builds upon and extends a number of existing projects.
In pursuit of NSR goals, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have visited over twenty countries, and signed memoranda of understanding with some of them. It has launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with 52 participating countries and an initial capital of US $ 100 billion, and a US $ 40 billion Silk Road Fund. It is also reinforcing the investment function of the China-Eurasia Economic Co-operation Fund.
Charles Simkins
Senior Researcher
charles@hsf.org.za
[1] The Financial Times of 16 August reports a current total of US $3.65 trillion and that US $315 billion has been used in the last twelve months of capital flight .