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CHINA's
"Belt and Road" scheme won mostly
good reviews at October's TPM conference
in Shenzhen - at least for its prospects
of success despite misgivings.
The
Beijing initiative that is likely to loom
large in the Communist Party's 2016-20 Five-Year
Plan, involves building land and sea infrastructure
from China to Europe through central and
south Asia as well as in Africa.
As
outlined, it will involve intergovernmental
financing as well as public-private partnerships
to build and/or upgrade ports, roads, bridges
and railways to build a New Silk Road.
By
slashing shipping costs through better infrastructure,
Kuehne + Nagel expects the initiative to
boost trade to US$2.5 trillion over 10 years
- a figure equal to all of China's trade
in 2013.
Domestic
GDP is expected to rise in neighbouring
countries, enabling Chinese market share
to grow together with China's diplomatic
and commercial influence.
Jens
Drewes, Kuehne + Nagel's north Asia Pacific
chief, saw the "belt and road"
initiative as an extension of the "Go
West" programme, which has dominated
China's socio-economic planning for more
than 10 years.
"In
previous five-year plans, all focused on
'go west' policies, and then from our point
of view, it is now a transition from 'go
west' into a wider range of 'one belt and
one road'," said the man from the world's
second biggest forwarder after DHL.
Mr
Drewes understood the "one belt, one
road" concept as a project to connect
65 countries, and with this connectivity
of countries K+N sees new logistics opportunities
by land, sea and air.
"We
are talking about a very early stage of
this campaign, first to create awareness,
awareness about investments and to set broad
budgets and areas of investments,"
he said.
"There
is no clear agenda of which projects are
to be done, only to set the agenda. Then
various trade and investment barriers must
removed," said Mr Drewes.
More
critical was John Lin, a Shanghai Maritime
University law professor, who is also researcher
from the Shanghai International Shipping
Institute (SISI), a Shanghai municipal think
tank.
The
idea, he said, is to mobilise, reallocate,
transfer the excessive production power
from east the eastern part of China to western
China, then to the neighbouring poorer countries.
"Unfortunately,
this is not mainly about shipping. Only
one per cent or less is about shipping.
And within that one per cent few words are
about shipping, but mostly referring to
sea, rail, multi-modal transportation,"
he said.
The
Beijing official paper describing the initiative
is entitled "Prospects and Actions
on Promoting of Co-construction of Belt
and Road 2015", said Mr Lin.
He
gave the document a poor review."It's
a campaign, the sort of campaign launched
by the new leader, Premier Xi [Jinping],
after he took the throne in 2013. In China,
new big bosses like to launch campaigns.
Everything planned in China starts as a
campaign," he said.
"Then
Xi, after he came to the driver's seat in
2013, launched a few campaigns and two of
them are worth noting, one is the free trade
zone that is to be used to compete and defend
against and fight with the TPP [Trans-Pacific
Partnership]." he said.
"By
this mechanism, the central government wants
to kill two birds with one stone, The first
bird is to increase political and commercial
influence in the neighbouring countries
in Asia, Africa and Europe and the other
is to sustain the growth for the Chinese
economy," he said.
"Shanghai's
my home town, but if you read the initiative,
Shanghai's completely left out, there's
no mention of Shanghai at all.
That's
absurd," he said.
"Shanghai
is building the international shipping centre,
so it's always good to upgrade those cities,
bringing those harbours in the eastern coastline
into the initiative," he said.
"You
may have noted the America, Canada, North
America and South America are also omitted,
either deliberately or imprudently from
those two maps," Mr Lin said.
"Shanghai's
my home town, but if you read the initiative,
Shanghai's completely left out, there's
no mention of Shanghai at all.
That's
absurd," he said.
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