THE most recently published white paper by the State Council Information Office titled “The Belt and Road Initiative: A Key Pillar of the Global Community of Shared Future” vividly reflects its global significance and splendid socio-economic achievements in all the member countries since its inception in 2013.It is a good omen that it remained cooperative despite the Western false and fake propaganda. It is a symbol of real economic globalization and a stimulator of global connectivity, infrastructure developments, rails, ports, and last but not least, the eradication of poverty in its member countries and the world alike.
Undoubtedly, it stayed the world’s largest platform for international cooperation and covered all aspects of economic stability, sustainability, social development, human capital growth, and digitalization through effective policy, infrastructure connectivity, friendly trade mechanisms, financial integration, and closer people-to-people exchanges. Moreover, through the true spirits of globalization, it helped mitigate global development challenges and improve the global governance system. Its opening of a people and humanity-friendly path aimed to achieve the desired goals of modernization, qualitative industrialization, and digitalization has now become its biggest hallmark. Its ensuring of building a global community of shared future is commendable, which is now transforming the world and delivering real results.
Moreover, its addressing of the global problems pertaining to weak economic growth, faulty economic governance, and imbalanced economic development in the member countries and the world alike shows its strong commitment towards development and resolution. The white paper rightly noted that the ultimate goal of the BRI is to help build a global community of shared future through people’s well-being, peaceful co-existence, prosperity, openness, innovation, and social progress and development in all the member countries.
On the other hand, a comparative study of the last ten years’ world history pinpoints that it was wrapped with wars, severe rivalries, competitions, and conflicts due to which geopolitics dominated the path of geo-economics; consequently, global economic recovery stayed low and dormant. Moreover, zero-sum theories and their brutal execution promoted the spirits of unilateralism, protectionism, and hegemonism. However, the BRI remained positive and productive, spreading rays of hope and better life in the world and mitigating spillover repercussions of Western geopolitics through economic cooperation and trans-regional connectivity. Ultimately, Global North and Global South became a bitter reality during the last decade. Resultantly, humanity suffered, societies tumbled, and states were trapped into poverty, unemployment, and discrimination.
However, the BRI effectively reduced ratios of poverty and generated new jobs, approximately 420,000 in the member countries. The World Bank has estimated that by 2030, BRI-related investments could lift 7.6 million out of extreme poverty and 32 million out of moderate poverty. Unfortunately, the world is now confronted with decoupling, de-risking, and unilateral imposition of socio-economic sanctions, technological war, and investment bans by Western countries to contain China and collapse its national economy, which is anti-development and anti-human. Nevertheless, the BRI’s orientation has started the concept of international cooperation through just development, digitalization, infrastructure, financial integration, and connectivity among all the member countries.
Now it is open, modern, inclusive, qualitative, and carries the spirits of internationalism and multiculturalism. Even its support of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development shows its humanistic orientations. According to the white paper, its signing of more than 200 BRI cooperation agreements with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations by June 2023 confirms its global economic effectiveness. In addition, the 193 UN member states’ consensus to incorporate the BRI in the UN resolution shows its global acceptability as an ideal platform for just global development.
The BRI has successfully institutionalized economic globalization and its coordination with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union framework, Kazakhstan’s Bright Road economic policy, Indonesia’s Global Marine Fulcrum initiative, and South Africa’s Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, and CPEC is commendable. It is an ideal combination of hard connectivity (land roads and sea routes) and soft connectivity (education, culture, sports, tourism, and archaeology). The BRI has built a vast network of cooperation with the member countries and across the globe. In summary, the BRI is a path to peace, prosperity, openness, innovation, and social progress. Based on a framework comprising “six corridors, six routes, and multiple countries and ports,” a multi-tiered and multidimensional infrastructure network is taking shape.
The white paper about BRI is timely, comprehensive, and holistic, covering all aspects of development and human values. It is a vivid reflection of international cooperation, economic globalization, modernization, openness, and qualitative development. The BRI was founded on the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits. It advocates win-win cooperation in pursuit of the greater good and shared interests. The BRI is committed to open, green, and clean cooperation towards inclusive and sustainable development, and it has zero tolerance for corruption and promotes steady and high-quality growth. The noting of the National Development and Reform Commission that China’s total imports and exports with countries involved in the BRI reached $19.1 trillion in the 2013-22 period, registering an average annual growth rate of 6.4 percent has once again confirmed its huge trade potential.
Moreover, two-way investment between China and BRI member countries totalled more than $380 billion between 2013 and 2022, among which China’s outward direct investment exceeded $240 billion, also highlighting its investment potential. It is a good thing that member countries actively invested in China and shared China’s development opportunities, with a cumulative total of more than $140 billion invested in China over the past decade and close to 67,000 new enterprises set up in China. It consolidates drives of poverty eradication through the narrowing of wealth disparity and boosts effective global governance.
It has produced tangible benefits which have indeed been constantly on the rise and increasingly self-evident. Now it has entered into the next phase of high-quality development which will be further enhanced through more coordinated growth in all the member countries and the world. This initiative was launched by China, but it belongs to the world and benefits the whole of humanity. The BRI is in alignment with the concept of a global community of shared future, and it provides not only a conceptual framework but also a practical roadmap for all nations to achieve shared development and prosperity. It seems that the future of the BRI belongs to green energies, digitalization, modernization, qualitative development, and artificial intelligence technologies.
—The writer is Executive Director, Centre for South Asia & International Studies, Islamabad, regional expert China, BRI & CPEC & senior analyst, world affairs, Pakistan Observer.
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