by Pepe Escobar for the Asia Times
China’s Belt and Road Initiative – the New Silk Road – will spark the country’s development and turn the dream into reality.
Now that President Xi Jinping has been duly elevated to the Chinese Communist Party pantheon in the rarified company of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, the world will have plenty of time to digest the meaning of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”
Xi himself, in his 3½-hour speech at the start of the 19th Party Congress, pointed to a rather simplified “socialist democracy” – extolling its virtues as the only counter-model to Western liberal democracy. Economically, the debate remains open on whether this walks and talks more like “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics”.
All the milestones for China in the immediate future have been set.
- “Moderately prosperous society” by 2020.
- Basically modernized nation by 2035.
- Rich and powerful socialist nation by 2050.
Xi himself, since 2013, has encapsulated the process in one mantra; the “Chinese dream”. The dream must become reality in a little over three decades. The inexorable modernization drive unleashed by Deng’s reforms has lasted a little less than four decades. Recent history tell us there’s no reason to believe phase 2 of this seismic Sino-Renaissance won’t be fulfilled.
Xi emphasized, “the dreams of the Chinese people and those of other peoples around the world are closely linked. The realization of the Chinese dream will not be possible without a peaceful international environment and a stable international order.”
He mentioned only briefly the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as having “created a favorable environment for the country’s overall development”. He didn’t dwell on BRI’s ambition and extraordinary scope, as he does in every major international summit as well as in Davos earlier this year.
But still it was implicit that to arrive at what Xi defines as a “community of common destiny for mankind”, BRI is China’s ultimate tool. BRI, a geopolitical/geoeconomic game-changer, is in fact Xi’s – and China’s – organizing foreign policy concept and driver up to 2050.
Xi has clearly understood that global leadership implies being a top provider, mostly to the global South, of connectivity, infrastructure financing, comprehensive technical assistance, construction hardware and myriad other trappings of “modernization”.
It does not hurt that this trade/commerce/investment onslaught helps to internationalize the yuan.
It’s easy to forget that BRI, an unparalleled multinational connectivity drive set to economically link all points Asia to Europe and Africa, was announced only three years ago, in Astana (Central Asia) and Jakarta (Southeast Asia).
What was originally known as the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road were endorsed by the Third Plenum of the 18th CCP Central Committee in November 2013. Only after the release of an official document, “Visions and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Roads”, in March 2015, the whole project was finally named BRI.
According to the official Chinese timeline, we’re only at the start of phase 2. Phase 1, from 2013 to 2016, was “mobilization”. “Planning”, from 2016 to 2021, is barely on (and that explains why few major projects are online). “Implementation” is supposed to start in 2021, one year before Xi’s new term expires, and go all the way to 2049.
The horizon thus is 2050, coinciding with Xi’s “rich and powerful socialist nation” dream. There’s simply no other comprehensive, inclusive, far-reaching, financially solid development program on the global market. Certainly not India’s Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC).
Have BRI, will travel
It starts with Hong Kong. When Xi said, “We will continue to support Hong Kong and Macau in integrating their own development into the overall development of the country”, he meant Hong Kong configured as a major BRI financing hub – its new role after a recent past of business facilitator between China and the West.
Hong Kong’s got what it takes; convertible currency; total capital mobility; rule of law; no tax on interest, dividends and capital gains; total access to China’s capital market/savings; and last but not least, Beijing’s support.
Enter the dream of myriad financing packages (public-private; equity-debt; short-long term bonds). Hong Kong’s BRI role will be of the Total Package international financial center (venture capital; private equity; flotation of stocks and bonds; investment banking; mergers and acquisitions; reinsurance) interlinked with the Greater Bay Area – the 11 cities (including Guangzhou and Shenzhen) of the Pearl River Delta (light/heavy manufacturing; hi-tech venture capitalists, start-ups, investors; top research universities).
That ties up with Xi’s emphasis on innovation; “We will strengthen basic research in applied sciences, launch major national science and technology projects, and prioritize innovation in key generic technologies, cutting-edge frontier technologies, modern engineering technologies, and disruptive technologies.”
The integration of the Greater Bay Area is bound to inspire, fuel, and in some cases even mould some of BRI’s key projects. The Eurasian Land Bridge from Xinjiang to Western Russia (China and Kazakhstan are actively turbo-charging their joint free trade zone at Khorgos). The China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor. The connection of the Central Asian “stans” to West Asia – Iran and Turkey. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) from Xinjiang all the way to Gwadar in the Arabian Sea – capable of sparking an “economic revolution” according to Islamabad. The China-Indochina corridor from Kunming to Singapore. The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) corridor (assuming India does not boycott it). The Maritime Silk Road from coastal southeast China all the way to the Mediterranean, from Piraeus to Venice.
Yiwu-London freight trains, Shanghai-Tehran freight trains, the Turkmenistan to Xinjiang gas pipeline – these are all facts on the ground. Along the way, the technologies and tools of infrastructure connectivity – applied to high-speed rail networks, power plants, solar farms, motorways, bridges, ports, pipelines – will be closely linked with financing by the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the security-economic cooperation imperatives of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to build the new Eurasia from Shanghai to Rotterdam. Or, to evoke Vladimir Putin’s original vision, even before BRI was launched, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.
Xi did not spell it out, but Beijing will do everything to stay as independent as possible from the Western Central Bank system, with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) to be avoided in as many trade deals as possible to the benefit of yuan-based transactions or outright barter. The petrodollar will be increasingly bypassed (it’s already happening between China and Iran, and Beijing sooner rather than later will demand it from Saudi Arabia.)
The end result, by 2050, will be, barring inevitable, complex glitches, an integrated market of 4.5 billion people mostly using local currencies for bilateral and multilateral trade, or a basket of currencies (yuan-ruble-rial-yen-rupee).
Xi has laid China’s cards – as well as the road map – on the table. As far as the Chinese Dream is concerned, it’s now clear; Have BRI, Will Travel.
It’s gone too good for too long time. Now they have to prepare themselves for any evil thing and malice they (and their enemies) can imagine.
I am actually thinking along same line. They need to be nibble, grounded, always learning from history, and keep the different view coming.
And best of all: Xi seems totally untouched by the frenzy, hysteria, madness, perversion, surrealism, warmongering, and utter chaos currently consuming the Western noosphere.
They have turned all ‘that’ on Russia and Putin.
They will pivot to China/Xi sooner than ever, and it will be even wilder than you can imagine. “Yellow Peril” will be the old made new again.
But it will also carry the dreaded Asian Flu of “Communism”!
America is always primed for the latest reversion to old fears.
In the 19th century the English geographer Halford Mackinder warned the British Government on the crucial role of Eurasia and the fact that a Russian-German economic union would create the most powerful economic block in the world. Mackinders writings were in 1997 expanded by Brzezinski, who published The Grand Chess Board, where he underlined the role of Eurasia and where he stated the US foreign policy goal of preventing the rise of any power which might challenge it’s global interests, namely Russia and China. The result was an inevitable Russian – Chinese economic alliance, whose results are apparent. Now a Eurasian Economic Union is in progress of being created, made up of Russia, China and Iran. Germany has always eyed Russia, in one form or another. It,too, will eventually join, once it discards the US influence. The Eurasian Economic Alliance is more than a century late. It should have been created in the late 19th century and called the Russian-German-Chinese Economic alliance. Two world wars were fought to prevent it. This article is about China. However, Chinese goals cannot be achieved independently, only thru the emerging Eurasian Economic Union. Once Germany joins, then most of Europe will inevitably follow. That is what Washington and Wall Street are trying to prevent.
Good “mapping” of the road map. Thanks, Pepe.
What is also obvious for those following the Empire’s hegemonic moves, the US has nothing to offer in competition. Nothing for the future. Nothing for Eurasia. Nothing but, maybe, war.
The US is using Japan with India as a possible competitor economically to China.
The US is moving its ISIS and AQ assets into South Asia and Southeast Asia to spread the terror war.
That’s the US policy for the dear friends of the Hegemon.
Test cases in Philippines and Pakistan/Afghanistan.
Soon, Myanmar, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Will all these nations, many Muslim, fall for the lure of the dollar and the US Navy/PACOM as counterpoint to China?
Very delusional route. Why carry goods to Russia through Central Asia, Turkey and Ukraine? Especially Ukraine! While this country exists, it is impossible to transport anything through this territory with 100% safety. The Silk Road will have a minimum of 2 overland routes: Central Asia / Turkey (maybe Syria / Egypt) and Kazakhstan / Russia / Europe. This is logical and minimizes the risks.
This was exactly what I was missing on the map! But perhaps the map pictures the historical route, to Venice. The 2 branched approach: the ´North stream´ straight to Moscow, St Petersburg, and a branch via Belarus to Hungary, Austria into the present EU would be much more secure and more direct in the supply chain.
US does seem mentally and morally bankrupt. ALL it offers are fanatical jihadists, proxies, drones and bombs, and becoming a total satellite of the US. Also the failed NWO banking scheme, which loots a country for the benefit of New York and London stockholders.
Pepe did a good job of distilling Xi’s speech into its more important segments, but he did bypass a few items. To see what was omitted, here’s a link to a transcript that reads from middle of page to top, http://live.china.org.cn/2017/10/17/opening-ceremony-of-the-19th-cpc-national-congress/
According to this map, Venice looks primed to regain its lost status as one of the most important trade centers in Europe, as it is scheduled to be the end destination of both the road and the belt. Interesting.
Much to digest, and think about.
Thanks Pepe.
Meanwhile, anyone interested in playing the interactive game which allows players to join in the clapping at Xi’s speech? It’s gone viral in China :
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/chinas-latest-online-viral-game-makes-clap-xi-jinping/
I’m sure Larchmonter will be first off the Vineyard blocks…. :-)
I applaud President Xi’s global vision.
I abhor his Party Politics Ideology.
And I think his reversion to a Maoism rigidity is a great danger to the success of his vision.
It could squelch the entrepreneurial spirit, the social dynamics of innovation and the sense of opportunity that has ignited the young and energetic to build a great China.
For China to peacefully succeed as the engine of global development and raising another half billion or more out of poverty, China’s society needs less ideology from the Central Government and more freedom to advance. What the leaders in Zhongnanhai need to do is clean up the swamp in the provincial and city governments. That’s where all the bad and wasteful and corrupt practices abound. Merely applying Party Discipline is not enough. A more responsive legal system and Rule of Law the citizens can trust is a huge need. It is long overdue. And Party Politics won’t address that. It only addresses its own needs for obedience and perpetual power with no competitors.
From SCMP:
China’s new leadership line-up revealed in full for first time with seasoned duo tipped to take key jobs
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2116411/seasoned-duo-tipped-take-key-jobs-communist-party
You know, I have some proof that BRI/OBOR is as American as it is Chinese, because I vividly recall the genesis of the idea clear back in1988…at a hotel in Berlin.
There are no accidents in history and it is no accident that:
1) The idea of defeating the Empire came from within what most of us now abhor as the “muscle”, the dumb corrupted sinews OF the Empire……while more of the American brain still developed….in Lyndon LaRouche….while most of the rest of the political class here was going senile.
2) That 1988 idea was further developed over the past nearly 30 years and mediated by a German who is now recognized in China (and was interviewed by China Daily for her analysis of this speech of Xi’s that Pepe Escobar writes so well about. ) as “The Silk Road Lady”, Lyndon’s wife.
Here’s the Link to the China Daily interview of 5 days ago:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-10/18/content_33419856.htm
3) AND It is not an accident that Helga Zepp LaRouche (that German referenced above…the Silk Road Lady) is 2nd in a list of 11 foreign commenters on Xi’s speech.
4) And it will not be an accident if something strange and desperate is done by the Empire to attempt to stop Trump’s signs of openess to consider the Deal of the Century on his Asia tour beginning November 3rd (…less than 2 weeks from now, guys…) including his first state visit to China, meeting with Xi.
The utmost vigilance on all fronts is therefore urgently called for!
Personally, I will be 100 if still alive by the completion of Xi’s Dream Timetable in 2050. Realistically, my little dream needs to be completed a decade or two before 2050! LOL.
About 15 or twenty years before then, my dream is to cross the tunnel between Alaska and Russia envisioned by Sergei Witte more than 100 years ago, when he instigated the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. AFTER Dmitri Mendeleyev returned to Russia with new ideas for Witte, after attending the first Centennial of the American Revolution, in 1876, in Philadelphia.
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3237witte.html
an excerpt, from the article’s beginning:
“The industrial take-off of the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War had shown to the world the superiority of the American System of political economy over the British “free-trade” model, which had long served as the straitjacket in which Anglo-Dutch finance maintained its stranglehold over the world economy. The success of the American System was most clearly manifest in the 1876 Centennial celebrations in Philadelphia, where all the achievements of U.S. industry were placed on exhibit. This helped to spur other nations to imitate this most successful model. In 1878, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck decided to break with the “Manchester school” of free trade, then endemic in German academic circles, and practiced in Germany, by instituting a protective tariff. In this way, he returned to the policies so brilliantly utilized earlier in the century by the German-American economist Friedrich List, in bringing the independent states of Germany into a customs union, the Zollverein (1834), which provided the first major step toward German unification. The great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev visited the 1876 Centennial and returned to Russia to encourage a productive tariff policy in order to promote the nascent Russian industrialization. In the Far East, Japan conducted the Meiji Revolution, unifying the nation, and, under the guidance of E. Peshine Smith, who had been sent to Japan by American economist Henry Carey for that purpose, and began to implement American System policies that would transform Japan into an industrial power. Similarly, in China, there were elements clearly aware that the imperial world of the Qing Dynasty would, one way or another, have to adapt to the new industrial paradigm. A young Sun Yat-sen was then being groomed by American missionaries in Hawaii for realizing that transition.
These various threads of transformation toward an industrialized economy on the Eurasian continent would be taken in hand by one individual, Russian Finance Minister Sergei Yulevich Witte, who would attempt to weave them together into a community of interest that might be able to withstand the attempts by the hegemonic Anglo-Dutch financial elites to sabotage that industrialization.
Witte’s Grand Design
The son of a civil servant, the descendant of a Baltic German family on his father’s side and a Russian mother, who was related to the prestigious Dolgoruky family, Witte studied mathematics, but quickly became interested in railroad building, then at its peak in Russia. There was a general understanding that holding the loose fabric of this vast empire together would require the sinews of the “iron horse.” The successful completion of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 sparked a keen interest in Russian industrial circles and led, in the 1880s, to a series of visits by Russian experts to study the technology of railroad building.”
Witte’s vision included the Bering Straits Tunnel I am so enamored with:
Here’s a video by liberal news (CNN) fools getting giddy, silly and incredulous about it:
https://youtu.be/CexUGGejPw0
A more serious link that contains the above one:
http://interbering.com/History-and-actual-development.html
If you don’t understand the rich significance that such a “nail in the coffin” of the (British) Empire the Bering Straits World Landbridge connection means, both symbolically and in physical economic/cultural/strategic terms…..that will be elucidated in due course.
To make a long story short, BF above is absolutely correct: This (BRI/OBOR/World Landbridge) is 100 years late!
Better Late Than Never!
Practically, the World War of the 20th century started immediately after the completion of the Transsiberian Railway an its junction with the Chinese Eastern Railway. It was the year when Sir Halford Mackinder traced the politics of sabotaging the emergence of the land communications ìn the World Island and of the attack of Japan against Russia at the behest of the, yes, Anglo-Zionists.
If u think really what globalist/capitalist fear mongering re communism-is the fact that govt controls capitalism.
That’s not such a bad thing when u compare the 1℅ “democratic” capitalists raping most of the us public of their wealth. Now the libsoros branding thinks it can lead us all like a horse to water w “socialism” to the” communist” east.
Umm no.
The narrative isn’t so fixed that people can’t see – china & Russia have done a good job managing thier resources-w/out globalists stealing it.
Why did Pepe put between inverted commas de expression “socialist democracy”? Can’t a democracy be socialist? There are some different ways of taking democratic decisions, I think…