Launch
This event was held alongside the launch of our third report: The UK’s strategic options for the Belt and Road.
Summary of remarks
Back in 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled his expansive vision of a modern Silk Road, promising to revolutionise China's global influence. Eight years later, and 130 countries have signed up to Xi’s signature foreign policy. But the ‘project of a century’ remains loosely defined and poorly understood.
Despite accusations of predatory debt diplomacy, Chinese infrastructure lending has been in decline since its peak in 2016 and 2017. Instead, a new era of the Belt and Road has been accelerated by the pandemic. China has pivoted away from physical infrastructure and accelerated its expansion of the Digital, Green and Health Silk Roads.
We were joined by a panel of three experts conducting some of the most interesting research on the Belt and Road Initiative, for a discussion moderated by Tom Tugendhat MP.
Jonathan Hillman - Senior Fellow at CSIS and Director of the Reconnecting Asia Project
Meia Nouwens - Senior Fellow at IISS and Digital Silk Road lead
Eyck Freymann - Author of One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford
Transcript
Download the full transcript.