The Belt and Road Initiative

A Pathway towards Inclusive Globalization

Liu Weidong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429824050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Belt and Road Initiative (hereafter BRI) of China has attracted worldwide attention and participation, causing a lot of debate over its implications for international society. Although it is still in a budding stage, the BRI seems to afford a framework for an increasing number of countries to explore jointly new international economic governance mechanisms and offer significant opportunities for them to cope jointly with global challenges. Taking a globalization perspective and tracking the ancient silk roads, this book tries to examine the general context in which the BRI is raised and implemented, arguing that this Chinese initiative, instead of replacing existing international cooperation mechanisms, is a call for the reform and development of neoliberal globalization and will open up a new era of inclusive globalization.

Inclusive globalization is neither an overturning nor a simple continuation of neoliberal globalization but rather a proposal capable of addressing the problems of existing globalization. The difference between them lies in the fact that globalization cannot only serve the "spatial fix" of capital but also has to meet the needs of living people. The book also addresses a number of major issues on building the Belt and Road and contains Chinese media's interviews with the author on various BRI issues. Given the author has been intensively involved in the study of and planning for the BRI, the book offers a valuable academic insight into this Chinese initiative.

1The Silk Road and the Silk Road Spirit¹

Originally proposed by Chinese president Xi Jinping in September and October 2013, respectively, the Belt and Road Initiative (hereafter BRI) refers to building the Silk Road Economic Belt (the Belt) and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (the Road). At present there is increasing consensus among a growing number of countries in the world that the BRI affords a framework to explore jointly new international economic governance mechanisms. Both the Belt and the Road use the notion of “Silk Road” (or the Silk Routes), a term expressing long-lasting historical relationships between different parts of the Eurasian Continent, to put the BRI at the forefront of top decision-making and public discussions.

To understand correctly the BRI, one has to first comprehend “Silk Road” and what it really implies. Two key points must be noted before any discussion of this term. First, although the Silk Road has always been specifically deemed to refer to historical phenomena, such as ancient trade routes, historical monuments or cultural relics, the use of this term in relation to the BRI does not lie in those specific phenomena but in its historical and cultural connotations, or what is called the Silk Road Spirit. The Silk Road Spirit refers specifically to the key values mentioned in the Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (hereafter Vision and Actions) that is, the pursuit of “peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit”. Second, the Silk Road, though it seems to refer to a Chinese “legend”, is indeed a historical and cultural heritage shared by many Eurasian and even African countries. The BRI, by taking advantage of this historical and cultural heritage (i.e., the Silk Road Spirit), roots today’s economic and trade cooperation among countries along the Belt and Road and the accompanying spirit and models of cooperation in the history of the Silk Road and what one can learn from it.

Cross-border and long-distance trade has existed for thousands of years. Recorded ancient long-distance trade can be traced back to around 3000 BC, mainly in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), where the goods traded were largely ancient luxuries such as spices, textiles and precious metals, among others. It was the geographical advantages of being the hub of regional trade networks that brought prosperity to many international cities in ancient times. As these cities had great concentrations of spices, textiles, jewelry, dresses and other luxury goods, they could meet the needs of surrounding areas to buy the above-mentioned products. For instance, Cyprus, known for its abundance of Cyperus papyrus and wool, had already become the trade center of the coastal area of the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt circa 2000 BC; Phoenicia, famous for navigation, grew into the center of the Mediterranean in the trade of cedar and linen dyes. The Silk Road across Eurasia is the representation and symbol of cross-border trade and cultural exchange in ancient times, which could be called the ancient version of globalization to some extent.

The Silk Road refers to the general term for long-distance commercial trade and cultural exchange routes gradually developed from ancient times, stretching through Eurasia and even reaching northern and eastern Africa. The Silk Road is a product generated from the interaction of material and spiritual culture between ancient China and other countries and nations, the result of collisions of Eastern and Western civilizations, and also an embodiment of the Chinese nation’s pioneering spirit in history. The Silk Road, from the perspective of history, connecting Eastern and Western cultures, enriched people’s material life of those ethnic groups and countries along the Road and facilitated the civilization process of the world. It was, looking back to the history of more than 2,000 years, not some fixed trade route but a bridge for communication between the West and the East. The specific routes of the Silk Road constantly changed as geographical conditions changed and the political and religious situation evolved. The opening and the prosperity of the Silk Road have promoted the socioeconomic development of a large part of the world’s most densely populated area in terms of politics, economy and culture. And the history of the Silk Road is the history of goods exchange, trade intercourse, and cultural interactions among the countries, ethnic groups, and various regions along the Road, which benefit greatly from such exchanges.

The Silk Road has profound economic and cultural foundations, and is the result of the highly developed human civilization. The great economic and cultural development of these countries and ethnic groups along the Road laid the foundation for the Road. Without the emergence and development of the Eastern and Western civilizations along the Road, there would be no Silk Road. The great development of economy and culture in countries along the Road created great material foundations for the emergence and opening of the Silk Road, while the differences in natural endowments and economy generated a strong desire and demand for material and cultural exchanges among people in those regions.

Political factors have also had a significant impact on the development of the Silk Road. Some dynasties in China often adopted more proactive policies and measures toward the opening of the Silk Road. The prosperity and development of all the major countries along the Silk Road also played an important role in the formation and smooth operation thereof. For instance, Zhang Qian’s two diplomatic missions to the Western Regions (xiyu) at the time of the Han dynasty; Ban Chao and his son Ban Yong’s administration over the Western Regions, Central Asia, and West Asia in the Eastern Han dynasty period; many envoys such as Han Yangpi being sent to Central Asia and Persia in the Northern Wei dynasty era; and the administration over the Western Regions, Central Asia, and West Asia by the Sui and Tang dynasties all contributed substantially to the exploration and sound operation of the Silk Road.

Technology development is another important element of the vicissitudes of the Silk Road. With the development of shipbuilding and navigation technology, the safety and cost of shipping greatly improved, and thus maritime transport was widely employed in international trade. Against the background in which the economic, industrial and cultural center of ancient China shifted for a while to coastal regions with the founding of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) in Hangzhou in southeastern China, the Maritime Silk Road, accompanied by the development of maritime transport technology, increasingly flourished. The treasure voyages, the seven Ming-era maritime voyages of the treasure fleet commanded by Admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, symbolized the flourishing of the Maritime Silk Road. The trade along the Maritime Silk Road was much more developed than that achieved on the backs of camels in the time of the land Silk Road.

I. The origin of the term “Silk Road”

Since The Travels of Marco Polo was published in Europe in the late thirteenth century, myths and legends about China and the Orient have attracted a lot of Europeans and led to a great number of works about China written by missionaries in their pursuit of the Kingdom of Prester John, even causing the trend of Sinomania. From the Serica, Sinae, and Mahacina before Christ to Tabgach and the Kingdom of Prester John, the passion of the West to explore the path toward China and the Orient never stopped growing. The Silk Road expedition in the nineteenth century was exactly an extension of such a tradition. Before the nineteenth century, people’s understanding of cultural exchanges between the East and the West were relatively superficial, and their awareness of the nature and significance of the Silk Road, acting as a major artery of economic and cultural exchanges between Asia and Europe and an important trade route between China and the West, was even more vague. The nineteenth-century expedition outlined the basic route of the Silk Road.

The term Seidenstraße(n) (“Silk Road(s)” or “Silk Route(s)”) was first invented by Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905), a German geographer. In 1860, Richthofen joined in the expedition to the Far East with a German economic mission and later conducted geographical and geological studies in China for almost four years starting in 1868. Back in Germany, Richthofen successively served as president of the Berlin International Geographical Society, president of the University of Berlin, professor of Geology at the University of Bonn and professor of Geography at the University of Leipzig, and he devoted the rest of his life to writing his master work, China; Ergebnisseeigener Reisen und daraufgegründeter Studien (China: The results of my travels and the studies based thereon; hereafter China), sharing his experiences and findings from his previous trips to the Eastern world. It took 35 years to complete and publish this five-volume masterpiece, the first two volumes of which were written by Richthofen in person and the rest compiled by his students based on his findings and materials accumulated before his death. In the first volume of the book, published in 1877, Richthofen first proposed the concept of Seidenstraße (Silk Road). This word was not something he imagined, but it related to his habit of focusing on study of the transport routes. In each survey, apart from documenting goods and products, he paid special attention to the routes for transporting them. Therefore, wherever he arrived in an area, Richthofen first had to describe the land and maritime traffic conditions of local places, and then record the towns and commercial routes formed on the basis of such conditions, which, thus, consisted of the main framework of Richthofen’s findings.

Richthofen gradually refined the historical context of the Silk Road by recording the transport routes in China, studying the routes of commerce and trade in Chinese history and referring to the records about Serica (the country producing silk) in the West. He found that as early as the Qin and Han dynasties, Chinese silk had been transported through today’s Xingjiang to Central Asia and then to Europe. At that time silk was called Ser, and China Serica, meaning the nation of silk. After the establishment of the Han empire, especially after Zhang Qian’s missions to the Western Regions, the frequency of occurrence of the term “Silk” increased greatly in Western literature. A trade route to Serica eastward from the Euphrates ferry was recorded by an ancient Greek geographer, Marinus of Tyre, and was included in the Geography compiled by Claudius Ptolemy, also an ancient Greek geographer living in first–second century AD. Matteo Ricci, S.J., who visited China in the Min dynasty, once said that “I also have no doubt that this is the country known as Serica”. By the nineteenth century, Sir Henry Yule, the British geographer known for his study The Travels of Marco Polo, published Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China. As such, the term Seidenstraße was just about to come alive.

On the basis of those previous studies and research, Richthofen first referred to the term Seidenstraße in his work China. However, he used this term in a quite prudent way, mainly to demonstrate his proposed railway line from Chine to Germany (starting from Xi’an, passing through the Hexi Corridor or the Gansu Corridor and Southern Xinjiang to Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran, and ending in Europe). Though Richthofen had been clearly aware of the existence and importance of other trade routes and maritime trade, the Seidenstraße in his conception still only referred to the Eurasian trade routes in the Han dynasty, or even more specifically, to the Eurasian transport routes from 128 BC to 150 AD. The German historian Albert Herrmann afterward developed Richthofen’s ideas in the book Die Alten Seidenstrassen zwischen China und Syrien (The Ancient Silk Road between China and Syria), published in 1910. And then after Sven Hedin, a student of Richthofen, published the book Die Seidenstraße (The Silk Road) in 1936, the term Seidenstraße became more and more recognized by the public and spread rapidly.

The expedition to Central Asia reached its peak at the time from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century when almost all orientalists, geographers, and archaeologists from European and American countries, represented by Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein, Albert Grünwedel, Nikolay M. Przhevalsky, and Pyotr Kozlov, visited China now and then. This period was an important stage in the study of the Silk Road. For the first time, scholars from various countries conducted in-depth studies with more scientific methods of the modern age. At that time, those Western explorers not only carried out geological, geomorphologic, and hydrological surveys in the central part of Asia that was a geographically unknown area, but also conducted investigations and studies of the ethnic groups, races, cultures, ancient sites, historical relics, the change of transport routes, the ups and downs of cities and towns, economy, and society along the Silk Road. In modern times, it was the first large-scale, systematic and scientific study of the history of Central Asia, Mongolian studies, the history of the Western Regions, Dunhuang Studies, the history of communications between China and the West, the history of northwestern ethnic groups and the history and geography of borderlands, which not only enriched the knowledge of the Silk Road from various aspects but also substantially influenced the methods and directions of the study on the Silk Road.

Building on translations of Die Seidenstraße written by Sven Hedin, the term Seidenstraße created by Richthofen, was translated from German to various languages, such as Silk Road or Silk Route in English, Routes de la Soie in French and “绢道” in Japanese. In the early twentieth century, French sinologist Édouard Chavannes in his work Documents sur les Tou-kiue (Turks) occidentaux (Documents on the Western Turks) first included the maritime trace into the realm of Silk Road, and then was followed by a number of Japanese and Chinese scholars. By the second half of the twentieth century, “Silk Road” had become the general term for long-distance business, trade and cultural exchange routes stretching through Eurasia and even reaching northern and eastern Africa in ancient times, and a synonym for amicable channels of exchange between the East and the West in economy, culture, and politics. Silk Road, as an academic term in studies on the exchanges between ancient China and countries in Central Asia and South Asia through the Hexi Corridor and Xinjiang, soon became widely used by international sinologists along with a continuous expansion of its contents from northwest land trade routes to southeast maritime trade routes, and the occurrence of derivations such as “Maritime Silk Road”, “Porcelain Road”, “Spice Route”, and “Tea Road”.

II. The background of the Silk Road

1. Zhang Qian’s diplomatic missions to the Western regions triggered strong motivations of the Han Dynasty to trade with Western countries

Around the late Qin dynasty and the early Han dynasty, the Huns² expanded their forces from what is now the west of Korea to the east of Xinjiang, directly controlling the northern and southern Gobi Desert and cutting off the trade path between China and the West. The Huns frequently attacked the Central Plains over the Great Wall and to the south. With the growth of national power during the reigns of Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing of the Han dynasty, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, in order to defeat the Huns, dispatched Zhang Qian to the Western Regions to make contact with Darouzhi, who was expelled by the Huns from their original homeland, for the purpose that Darouzhi could persuade countries in the We...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Silk Road and the Silk Road Spirit
• 2 Economic globalization and its limitations
• 3 General context of the Belt and Road Initiative
• 4 Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative
• 5 Issues on how to build the Belt and Road
• Appendix 1: Relevant essays
• Appendix 2: Relevant interviews
• References
• Index