The China Belt and Road Initiative

This chapter, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), briefly examines the historic influences of the fabled network of trade routes once called the Silk Road connecting China and the Far East to the Middle East and the rest of Europe. This had been a conduit from East to West and back again for goods, services, ideas, religions, and people for almost 2,100 years since the age of the Han Dynasty. It has had many on-again, off-again periods of operation due to geopolitical influences and other such interruptions as various war campaigns and lands along the route being conquered by invading empires but has since become a rekindled undertaking and a personal “feather in his cap” for China’s President Xi Jinping who announced to the world in 2013 a new proposition he called One Belt, One Road (OBOR). This chapter will take us through a quick look into the history of the Silk Road itself as well as the origins of OBOR, later renamed as the BRI in 2016, including the many challenges endured over the past eight years. We will review and examine both the negative and positive aspects of what has transpired over this short period of time bringing us up to date with the current “state of affairs” for the BRI including a look at an equally ambitious project announced by the US at the G7 Summit and another one by the EU at the end of 2021 to counter China’s growing influence among the world’s developing nations. The BRI is more than just a “road” of course, and it consists of eight separate trade corridors winding their way through a combination of many countries, each with its own geopolitical and geographical hurdles to overcome. The BRI is an ambitious and monumental pursuit that is fraught with many challenges that present obstacles along every step of the way. These include a variety of issues such as but not limited to enormous financial demands, the lack of infrastructure, timeline constraints, governmental changes within and between nations, natural disasters, and more recently in 2020 a global pandemic that has had an extremely negative impact on most economies around the world and led to the disruption of the supply chains required to keep the initiative on track. Finally, this chapter will discuss the considerations, implications, risks, and rewards for those seeking business opportunities related to the initiative.