Introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative is a key feature of China’s foreign policy, consistent with Xi’s push to advance what he describes as a new era of major-country diplomacy. Substantively, the initiative aims to promote mutual economic development and inter-regional connectivity.
This is consistent with China’s need to assume a greater international leadership role given its fast rising position as a global power in an increasingly multipolar world, and can be described as a liberation-oriented effort that’s trying, once and for all, to break cycles of underdevelopment and poverty, reversing colonial and neo-colonial exploitations, and resisting old and new hegemonies.
Win-win strategy
Belt and Road is a succinct English translation of the Chinese term, “one belt, one road” (). Belt refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt, a network of overland road and
