China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its Global Implications - By Chandrakant Singh
Background
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the launch of both the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. It is essentially a state-financed, state-backed, infrastructure initiative to build infrastructure across Central Asia and other parts of the Indo-Pacific.
Subsequently, both of these initiatives got subsumed within a project, which was initially termed as One Belt, One Road(OBOR) and eventually termed as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.
The overland belt envisages creation of an economic and trade corridor extending from China’s west through Central ....