Belt and Road Initiative not a 'Chinese plot': Xi tries to allay concerns

President Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy plan to build a new "Silk Road" of infrastructure and trade links between China and Eurasia is not a "Chinese plot", Xi said on Wednesday, according to state media.

Xi's Belt and Road Initiative, unveiled in 2013, aims to bolster a sprawling network of land and sea links with Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

At a summit last May, Xi pledged $126 billion for the plan, but has failed to overcome suspicion in Western capitals, where officials suspect the professed desire to spread prosperity in the region is foremost an attempt to assert Chinese influence.

"The Belt and Road Initiative is not a Chinese plot, as some people internationally have said," Xi told a gathering at the annual meeting of the Chinese Boao Forum for Asia in the southern province of Hainan.

"It is neither the post-World War Two Marshall Plan, nor is it a Chinese conspiracy. If you had to (call it something), it's an 'overt plot'," he added, the official news agency, Xinhua, said.

In Mao's league? Xi Jinping's BRI a political masterstroke, says expert

The One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative must be seen as a political and economic masterstroke by Chinese President Xi Jinping, in terms of its domestic as well foreign impact, an expert has said.

"The singular contribution of the man now vying for a place next to Mao in the pantheon of Chinese leaders, Xi Jinping, is the One Belt, One Road project. It was a public relations triumph: Mao destroyed the old order, Deng Xiaoping laid the foundations of a modern economy, Xi is making China great again," said Philip Bowring, who has been writing on regional financial and political issues successively as correspondent for the Financial Times, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and columnist for the International Herald Tribune, in an article published in nybook.com.

"This plan, now more often known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to use China's money and know-how to develop relations with a host of developing countries across Eurasia and to the coasts of Africa has proved a political masterstroke at home and abroad," he added.

He mentioned that for foreigners, China appears to be extending a hand of friendship, economic development, and trade across half the world.

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Bowring said for the Chinese people, it is an expression of new-found pride in the nation's power and wealth.
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