by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with the Asia Times by special agreement with the author)
Belt and Road Initiative is a strategic axis embodying the organizing Chinese foreign policy concept for the next three decades
The New Silk Roads symbolize way more than high-speed rail lines crisscrossing Eurasia, or a maze of highways, pipelines and port connectivity. They represent a Chinese alliance with at least 65 participating nations, responsible for 62% of the world’s population and 31% of its GDP.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as it’s formally known, is not a “road” or a collection of roads, like the Ancient Silk Road. It’s a strategic axis embodying the organizing Chinese foreign policy concept for the next three decades. And BRI goes beyond Eurasia and Africa, extending all the way to Latin America as well, as Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed in January at the summit between China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean states.
Tackling every field from communications strategy to infrastructure, finance, culture, education and geopolitical relations between states, BRI aims to reinforce China’s political capital.
The emphasis so far – we’re still in the initial planning stage – is not even on concrete projects, although some are already game-changers. Take for instance the new railway linking the dry port of Khorgos, on the China-Kazakhstan border, to Almaty (in Kazakhstan), Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara (in Uzbekistan), Turkmenabat (in Turkmenistan), to Mashhad in Iran and all the way to Tehran.
Because China is the only nation in the world to have devised a nearly global strategy in terms of trade and investment, BRI is allowing China to shape what Washington defines as the “rules-based” international system closer to its priorities. The global economic context, slowly but surely, will be adapting to what BRI represents.
So it comes as no surprise that from an Anglo-American point of view, BRI-bashing is now a cottage industry. BRI is routinely derided as neo-colonialism and debt enslavement, pronounced “dead” in Malaysia – and soon to be dead in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Yet the fact is Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, for instance, sees BRI as an opportunity – as it aims to connect Eurasia with each city node profiting from the increased business traffic. BRI just needs to be tweaked to fit into each nation’s priorities.
Expanding the brand
BRI is now merged into the China brand. BRI is the brand leading to the “Chinese Dream” that President Xi Jinping is promoting, of a global power with pride of place in the international order.
The leadership in Beijing will be learning a few BRI lessons – fast. Expect the focus to be centered on a few, selected infrastructure projects able to make their mark and set quality standards. Pakistani diplomats, for instance, are convinced CPEC – the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor – is one of these projects.
Beijing will be more attentive to developments that practically improve people’s lives in BRI-participating nations, decided in a more transparent manner. So expect, the Asia Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB), for example, to work more closely with the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
BRI-bashing is inevitably linked to the fact that Western geopolitical and geoeconomic dominance – a brief historical interlude – is coming to an end. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former UN ambassador argues in his latest small tome ‘Has The West Lost It?’ that the rules of the new world order will be set in the East, that international law is bound to change, and the heart of financial institutions and global trading structures will be dominated by China and India.
Now imagine the haughty West having to adapt to a new normal that responds to a Confucian – or even Hindu – way of organizing society. The only American response so far has been to launch a self-defeating trade war.
It does not matter that Xi is trying hard to apply Confucian ethics to the vast spectrum of rational governance. The Western depiction of China as a neo-Orwellian autocracy-surveillance state is bound to persist – condemned to suffering the ignominy of a middle-income trap and even to be the loser in an eventual war generated by a recycled Thucydides Trap.
So expect books with titles such as “The End of the Asian Century”, drenched in racism, to continue arguing that the Chinese miracle is dead and what lies ahead is nothing but a “weak and dangerous” Asia.
It may be enlightening to introduce the work of the great Paul Virilio, who recently passed away, into this debate. The creator of a discipline, “dromology” (dromos = speed), developed in essential books such as ‘Speed and Politics’ (originally published in France in 1977) and ‘The Aesthetics of Disappearance’ (1980), Virilio, before anyone else, anticipated the era of global “tele-surveillance”.
High speed and depth of field
Speed, as Virilio analyzed it, is an essential factor in the distribution of wealth and power. In each historical epoch, the dominant mode of transport determines the organization of society. From Ancient Greece – home of the popular saying “those who make ships sail govern the city” – to the horse riding at the basis of feudalism and the rail dynasties during the explosion of capitalism.
China has a particular relationship with speed. The speed of its own economic miracle has no historical parallels. BRI may be – for now – progressing at slow speed, but a possible future vision may be glimpsed via China’s obsession with high-speed rail and how what happens inside China may offer the blueprint for a BRI-linked Eurasia.
Internally, China is organizing itself around 20 mega-urban environments with tens of millions of people each. Shenzhen, in the Pearl River Delta, is already China’s fourth economic hub, where almost half of all international patents are registered.
The $18-billion, 55 kilometer-long Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai bridge now allows a 180-minute loop starting from Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport across the New Territories, Shenzhen and its state of the art airport, the upper part of the Pearl River Delta on the way to Guangzhou, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and finally Macau. The Great Bay Area incorporates 10 cities.
Beijing for its part boasts seven ring roads. The latest, the G 95 (Capital Region Ring Expressway), inaugurated in early 2017, runs for 940 kilometers, structuring the immense in-progress Jing-Jin-Ji megalopolis (Beijing, Tianjin and certain areas of Hebei).
Virilio, decades before our lives became ruled by a complex of screens, was already delineating how the single formatting of the world in parallel to the reconstitution of local feudalities was a double threat linked to the decline of the nation-state.
China though is a civilization-state, and BRI may hint at something completely different. Virilio stressed that if the world is flat – as it seems to be now – it loses its depth of field and that man loses its depth of action and reflection, turning into a two-dimensional man. That’s the condition to which the kingdom of the screen condemns us.
But what if BRI, with its emphasis on high-speed connectivity, was aiming at three-dimensional man with a depth of field not only Eurasian, but virtually global?
Pepe sets the stage and China draws the curtain on a new and better, smarter and more human world civilization. Thus far, it is only 5% drawn. In the rest of our short lives it should become much clearer what is happening…. .unless the Old World Disorder blows the whole theater up.
Ego is the blatant enemy of any real global consciousness and the poison that has sickened the western oligarchical “elites”…..and societies……….. for millenia. It is clearly reflected in their Satanic and Luciferian “religion” of “the ego run amuck”…the dark and hateful refuge of the spiritual coward and slave, whose only conception of survival on this “prison planet” ….is to be the sadistic, criminal prison wardens…and executioners.
But not all prominent and influential westerners have been satanic slaves. The New Silk Road would not frighten ALL of them. I speak not of Marco Polo but have Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in mind. I speak not of a physical traveller who spent decades in the Far East but of a spiritual and intellectual traveller who grasped the current potential for a happier, wiser more co-operative world 3+ centuries ago, recognizing harmony and congruence between Confucian and Christian principles properly understood ….back in the 17th century.
Yet even in this community we have people that don’t or seemingly can’t get it. They have no ego identification with it and feel nothing for the pinched insecure fates of billions of persons east of themselves in Eurasia (much less Africa or South America) and insist that their pet grievances and ideological prejudices must be heard first and foremostand BRI, OBOR, SCO, BRICS and even a Multi-Polar World Order ought to be disparaged and undermined, as only THEIR myopic experiences and narrow ego-identifications are able to move their tortured, mixed up, dysfunctional minds and unhappy “little me” selves.
There…. is the even Greater …and much more challenging! (LOL) ….Work………than the construction of the physical connectivity Pepe sees unfolding. A Greater Work…..located within billions of human hearts and minds.
Yes, yes, Leibniz. For him Russia was the bridge between China and what was still good in Europe. He was the inspirer of Peter the Great.
This video deals with the influence of Leibniz on B&R in great detail…
The New Silk Road – New Model for International Relations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-PqZRfOL7c
Indeed! I remember Helga (nee Zepp) a quarter of a century ago urging support for the “New Silk Road” for reasons of peace and moral policy.
“Ego is the blatant enemy of any real global consciousness and the poison that has sickened the western oligarchical “elites”…..and societies……….. for millenia. It is clearly reflected in their Satanic and Luciferian “religion” of “the ego run amuck”…the dark and hateful refuge of the spiritual coward and slave, whose only conception of survival on this “prison planet” ….is to be the sadistic, criminal prison wardens…and executioners.”
Wow! I cant get past this for a minute. i got to stop and come back later. it is a very accurate, clarifying way to describe he western elites.but we still must deal with their capitalism morphed into more humane versions in BRI regions. it still has to go, for however brief it may give economic lift there it will turn and begin to eat the people
The re-emergence of 3-dimensional humans from the 2-dimensional humans of the flat screen? Thanks, Pepe, for that hopeful introduction to the Asian century.
I thought Western banksters and industrialists facilitated the move of Western industry and technology into China? Are those facts or is that a racialist narrative? China was also the victim of Marxism; and the Chinese Communists also had links to Western banksters and intellectuals.
I have learned to reject the Western narrative and now see it for what it is, a bankster-run nightmare; but why should I meekly accept the new narrative about China? The facts do not add up because I see bankster finger-prints all over Communist China. Are we witnessing a shift in the bankster centre of power from West to East? Same players but a new fake narrative — out with Western “freedom” an in with the new Eastern “enlightment”.
I’m sorry but I’m not convinced by Pepe. Too many times have I witnessed a bogus Hegelian setup. We learned too late that the Communists were backed by the bankers and industrialists — has this suddenly changed? We are always given a false opposition to lead us into the deserved outcome of the global oligarchs.
Look to Russia for inspiration; not China.
Flopot, I can answer part of what your question: Did Western investors nourish the Eastern Tiger cubs? Already in the 1940s a great French poet and diplomat, Paul Valery, was warning that the West would pay dearly for transferring our technology (our only advantage) to low wage countries in the far East: “to the more populous, the more frugal, more industrious and more socially cohesive part of the world”.
Flopot To say that the bankers and industrialists supported the communists does NOT translate into they controlled, organized and motivated them. Communism was self created. However that fact is buried deep under layer upon layer of Capitalist ideological denial. It is telling that China’s greatest poet of the 20th century was Mao.
Communism/socialism as an ideology evolved from Marx & Marxism, who was supported by the City of London financial interests as a means of using the industrial working class of continental Europe, particularly Germany, against German industrial capitalist interests. Marxism has been carefully cultivated within the Anglosphere’s intellectual/academic circles primarily for this purpose, but also to use it against industrial capital within the Anglosphere itself. There is a marked distinction between finance capital and industrial capital within the contemporary Anglo-American system. It is commonly held that the US off-shored its industry to China from the 1970s on in order to exploit cheap labor & maintain the profitability of US manufacturers. This was only part of the story, a more prevalent reason was a bid by Wall St./City of London to transform the Anglo-American economies into finance capital dominated by ridding themselves of the rivalry of industrial capital, which via wage levels & employment rates could influence inflation, i.e. the value of the Dollar & Pound Sterling. Wall St./City were able to wrest this influence away & gain total control over the value of currency by prompting industry to off-shore. This is a simplification of a much more complex story, but essentially, the reason why Marxism & communism/socialism emerged as an ideology within the West & then spread outward was because it was supported by financial interests, that used it against industry. Note that Marxism has always had an ambivalent stance toward banking, their focus was always on the capitalist owners of industry. Karl Marx himself fled Germany & eventually settled in London where he was an agent of Lord Palmerston, using David Uquart as handler. Hence Wall St./City involvement in the Bolshevik revolution, in supporting Mao’s communists, bringing Tito to power in Yugoslavia in fighting the royalist Serbian chetniks, & on & on.
“We learned too late that the Communists were backed by the bankers and industrialists ‘
I have been reading Geert Mak’s “In europe.” It is a popular history of Europe told in the form of an extensive kind of travelogue.
Mak is very, very popular in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. This book was published in 2007, and the Eng. trans. in 2008. Imagine my amazement, in his chapter titled “Stockholm,” to read in this popular, AFAIK uncontroversial book of the meeting between Alexander Parvus (born Israel Lazarevich Gelfand in Belarus (1867-1924) and Lenin in STockholm in 1917 (I think that year is correct), of the German Reich’s enabling of Lenin’s “secret” train and financing of Lenin and his trip, of German intelligence’s great interest in fomenting social division, upheaval, revolution against the tsar, and chaos in Russia as a war aim, to weaken the enemy Russia. What happens next was soemone else’s problem. Namely, the Russians’ . . .until it became Hitler’s, Roosevelt’s, Churchill’s etc. etc. The description of the various antics of the fellow travelers on the train creates an impression that these people were pretty immature—way too immature to run a revolution and a country.
This book does not have footnotes or a bib. It is a work of popular history.
I find the matter-of-factness of the recounting of this story and the implication of Jewish bankster underpinnings quite startling.
Katherine
Katherine; It was common practice for the European nations during WW1 to attempt victory over their enemies by attempting to forment revolution in the enemy countries. It was regarded as a great way to win the war. Revolutionaries tended to know this and exploited the situation.
Isn’t it still the same? Just take a look of the consequences of “Arab Spring Revolution”, “Colour Revolution” sponsored/agitated/abetted by iFUKUS?
Pepe,look at the first years of the judeo-bolchevik revolution in Russia.there you have enough “parallels” to correct some of your assesments.
“I have learned to reject the Western narrative and now see it for what it is, a bankster-run nightmare; but why should I meekly accept the new narrative about China?”
I think lifting 700 million out of poverty and eradicating it entirely by 2020 is proof in the pudding. What bankster run capitalist country would dedicate as much money and manpower into poverty alleviation as China? Moreover, President Xi said, “the aim of BRI is not to set up a geopolitical or military alliance, nor will it be a China Club.” The significance of jointly building the Belt and Road is not about blindly trusting China and goes beyond economic cooperation, it is a way to improve the global development model and promote a more equitable form of globalization by requiring more projects that could benefit the local people along the routes of the BRI, such as making efforts to ensure financial support and boosting exchanges in education, science, culture, sports and tourism. Even in this very early stage, signs of increased exchanges are already evident and as history has shown the more countries trade the less likely chance for conflict.
“I think lifting 700 million out of poverty and eradicating it entirely by 2020 is proof in the pudding.”
https://www.spring.org.uk/2008/04/why-chinese-are-getting-richer-but-not.php
Data examined in a new study to be published in the Journal of Happiness Studies highlights a striking paradox in the expanding Chinese economy. While the Chinese are getting richer, they don’t seem to be getting happier – in fact they’re getting more unhappy. This paradox may have much to teach other expanding societies about the perils of financial inequality.
And http://fameiva.com/happiest-tribe-on-earth/
Members of a primitive tribe, called Pirahã, are said to be the most simple and happiest people living on mother Earth
’Journal of Happiness Studies’ — typical Euro-trash bogus ”intelligentsia” publication, with Mathias Döpfner (Axel Springer Verlag) as the pimp-in-chief. To him and his hired pens, lifting 700 million out of poverty and eradicating it entirely by 2020 (!) is no welcome news as it is anathema to his Zionist superiors; Döpfner describes himself as a ”non-Jewish Zionist”, mind you.
Borrom line: The Chinese ’unhappiness’ which this rag blathers about is the anguish felt by the Zionazis themselves. They tried the same funny approach half a century ago regarding Sweden, whose very promising development was but a mirage since the Swedes were, allegedly, committing suicide en masse.
Borrom line
Is that the Finnish vulgarity would certainly be shunned by the Pirahã.
I imagine you are obliged to explain how the Chinese people ere victims of Marxism..
no doubt Mao, Chu etc were Marxist but there were growing ideological pains..not to mention the stage may not have developed enough for full fledged democracy..more ready for what in fact emerged. the re-emergence of capitalism in’humane’ style may open the way to easy transition to democracy or socialism soon enough.
it does not matter who backs the Chinese currently…including the evil forces as long as the people emerge dominant or advanced on the way to democracy. the fact is capitalism has its basic contradiction that can be resolved only by or in it’s evolution into another stage of social organization..at this point socialism or some kind of extreme dictatorship appear to be the evolutionary options
if the capitalism in place..like the Chinese capitalism.. is paying proper wages, universal health, truthful and relevant education, no brutalization of the people etc etc… whats the diff. it is a short step from that to full socialism as soon as the inevitable problems of debt and concentration arise. all that remains to be done is to eliminate the worker/owner relationship, socialise the banks or reconstitute them completely with an entirely service profile and massive reduction in size..all of them.
there is no humane purpose and social value in big banks, public or private… and in few individual owners with billions in their pockets, with way undue social influence.
I dont see a problem with Marxism as basic guide as long as the work is done to update in the process of governing..and governing must pass into popular hands. that’s the answer. and the people must be ready to carry thought the democracy..and they can only be prepared to do that by capitalist experience and the failure of capitalism
capitalism is always in a state of failure.. but do the people see and understand, are they ready to bell the cat period? when they are its game over for capitalism. and a capitalism like the current Chinese model can do the job. the Chinese people are getting very developed and capable of real socialism
the idea in my head is that there be can be or will be spontaneous popular risings without the need or lead of socialist parties and leaders etc., in which the people end the status quo and on the spot begin to create structures to meet their needs that the unsatisfactory established structure had failed to meet. the new structures that successfully meet the popular need(s) are the democratic social advances that take society forward.
and once it is popularly accomplished it eliminates the need for the left parties and the parasitic bureaucracies they walk with.
I am not disappointed with with Marxism and the previous and current games of the bankers/Capitalist all along the way. that was/is to be expected in the struggle to get it right. and the struggle and failures always explain what was done wrong/what was right, increasing globally popular sophistication for the next time wherever it emerges
Maybe the Western Ruling Class sold-out some time ago and the major factions, at least, have been in the process of liquidating Western Civilization for their personal cash profit. Trump may represent other factions with an opposing strategy. Trump is not starting a tariff war, he is finally responding to the Chinese and EU tariff war which has been in place for decades, ever since Nixon and Kissinger sold-out Western Civilization.
Remember of course that the western politicians always say the opposite of what they really mean. This I learned from the Clintons, of course.
Thus, the “rules based international order” actually refers to the “no-rules” international order. We of course see that the western nations immediately break any rules that they happen not to like at that time. They create a set of rules that they feel to be to their benefit, then force everyone to agree to them. Then, at a later time, they decide those rules don’t apply to them when they are inconvenient.
The trap is that people attempt to be rational, which is to try to understand what the rules are and to thus be able to use them to their benefit. But this of course is a waste of time because as soon as they try to apply the rules to their benefit, the westerners immediately break the rules and proclaim that those rules don’t apply. Certainly not to them.
The obvious current example is the claims of “meddling” in other nations affairs, which is a great crime when it inconveniences the oligarchs in their rigged democracies. But the oligarchs feel perfectly within their rights to openly interfere with the politics of other nations, and to sanction and even invade those countries where the ‘wrong’ people are chosen in an election. The fact that the government of Venezuela has held and won many elections regarded as generally fair, but which is called a dictatorship by the rulers of a democracy that is so rigged that one dollar is considered one vote thus elections are always “won” by the oligarchs
Its a common western saying that “all’s fair in love and war”, and they consider all of their relations with other people to fall into one of those two categories.
Those who fail to see the world has ‘depth of field’ and appears to be two-dimensional are those who have lived by the western notion of “an eye for an eye” and thus have lost one of the two eyes that provided paralax and depth of field to vision. It is this second eye which allows one to see the world in at least three of the multiple dimensions that physicists say exist.
Origins of the idea of the Silk Road we can find in ancient book Tao Te Ching .
Tao. A road, a path, the way by which people travel , the way of nature and
The Way of ultimate Reality.
“The Way is a void,
Used but never filled,
An Abyss it is,
Like an ancestor
From which all things come …”
Why would there be so much US resistance against China lately?
Perhaps because of this:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-is-giving-china-the-keys-to-its-largest-port-and-the-u-s-navy-may-abandon-israel-1.6470527
The US will lose 100 points from its Social Credit score ;)
Darn. It is behind a pay wall.
But here is another story about it:
https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-deal-take-over-key-israeli-port-may-threaten-us-naval-operations-1121780
Katherine
Trump will only hasten the development of China’s B&R. As his trade ‘war’ pushes many countries into economic uncertainty, China’s B&R is the only economic and financial certainty in the foreseeable future. And as the sniggering at Trump’s boasts at the UN assembly suggested, Trump is not believable nor trusted by the world leaders.
Which figures. Trump, who as a businessman, had reportedly filed for bankruptcy 6 times, is likely to send the USA into financial and economic bankruptcy with his policies (e.g. his US1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich), and especially his trade ‘wars’.
China is breaking out of isolation and creating global networks whether physically by road/rail across Eurasia and into Africa and South America or electronic through ZTE and Huawei and CEC.
Countries like Germany continue to offer free university tuition to Chinese students but charge fees for kindergarten places………it seems The West has a complacency which suggests decadence and collapse.
Russia has been through collapse as Dmitri Orlov delineated in his beautiful book “Reinventing Collapse” which too few Western politicians have read.
If the Bloomberg stories about Supermicro Mobos were true it would mark a devastating indictment of Western infrastructure brought about by subcontracting the fundamentals of modern Western society to producers in a nation whose values are politically antithetical to those held in The West
The Bloomberg story is bogus, which a number of tech experts explain why it is almost impossible in practice (various links of the second part of the article ).
This China-bashing propaganda war concerted by MSM and their handlers (half a dozen of information providers to the Bloomberg’s article are US intelligent officials). IF you believed the MSM who sold you the WMD lies before, then it is of course your choice to believe them again this time.
”BRI is routinely derided as neo-colonialism and debt enslavement /…/ ”
To which the immediate corollary question becomes: And your (West’s) problem with that is what, exactly?
The West is in a state of irreversible rot all along the line. Seems it only has lies, imbecilities and sheer incompetence on offer. Better believe me: If Stockholm’s city and infrastructure planners were to be hired by the Chinese in their huge BRI projects, the notion of ’Die dummen Schweden’ would become an instant legend, LOL. Could be interesting to learn what the Asian peoples would have to say about brand-new railway stations deep underground with all their escalators usually broken, forever awaiting ’repair’.
And the answer to your question would be: ‘We’re not the ones doing the enslaving and plundering.’
Not that I believe that’s what China intends to do of course.
The West can’t even save itself from neo-colonialism, debt enslavement by ZOG’s and from bad psychological habits like projection and believing in ideology.
And yet I still have faith that the individual human soul/spirit is like a Zen Buddhist monk who is capable of helping his ego/pupil redeem themselves via the kick in the butt when they don’t know the answer to the zen reality koan.
I certainly believe that the West is in a state of rot, but that it’s not irreversible.
With all due respect to Pepe, Paul Virilio was not to the first anticipate’ tele-surveillance’ in the late seventies. That accolade goes the famous sci fi wrtier Phillip K. Dick . In the early sixties in many books, “Eye in the Sky” being one, he identified that eventuality.
Loved the Pepe article.
All these grand plans east and west ignore the ongoing collapse of industrial civilization on so many fronts. The high speed trains will be empty, and the soaring bridges useless when the human population faces extinction. Dream on, but reality will make a mockery of your hubris and it’s fantasies….
Western Establishment nonsense well stated!
I like to think of this change in simple geometrical terms.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2017/12/rectangular-to-polar-conversion.html
‘…Xi is trying hard to apply Confucian ethics to the vast spectrum of rational governance. The Western depiction of China as a neo-Orwellian autocracy-surveillance state is bound to persist…’. Yeah, coz its true.
As for Confucius…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/commentary-6-on-how-the-chinese-communist-party-destroyed-traditional-culture_3948.html
I see no one here cares about individual rights and the rule of law, goods in very short supply in the up-coming China dominated World or at least EuroAsian land mass.
Sure, individual rights and the rule of law in the West have always been more ephemeral than it should have been, but the ruling class supported its appearance to stay in power, violating it only “when the chips” are down which seems more and more often as they sell-out to China.
China’s ruling class has zero respect for individual rights and the rule of law. Good luck, world!