What’s happened?
China has marked ten years of the Belt and Road Initiative with a big conference (the Belt and Road Forum) in Beijing. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the English term for China’s massive investments in foreign infrastructure – mostly in poorer countries – that has grown into the world’s biggest multilateral development programme on record. President Xi welcomed world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Indonesia’s Joko Widodo, to celebrate the BRI’s achievements and chart a course for the future. He was also notably emphatic, amid discontent at home over the cost, about China’s need to ensure
