The View | An alphabet soup from the Belt to the Road, TPP and AIIB
The geopolitical initiative is having more comebacks than Frank Sinatra. First up is “the Belt and Road” – of which the Belt is a proposed highway retracing the trading path of the Silk Road – down which the Mongol Emperor, Genghis Khan, rampaged in the 13th Century.
“The Road” is in fact a maritime sea route linking China with Europe; ironically tracing much the same route West, as the British East India Company took to come East 300 years ago.
Asian leaders are flying over these roads like never before, with President Xi and Premier Li spending barely a night in their own beds. Narendra Modi of India has just completed his 30th foreign trip as Prime Minister and he was only elected last year.
APEC ... meetings are memorable for the photo opportunity of middle-aged leaders wearing silly theme shirts. Fortunately coconut halves and grass skirts have not yet featured
Then there is the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership, formed in October) - a band of brotherly states around the Pacific, initially a few Southeast Asian nations but which now incorporates Australasia, Canada, Japan and the US.
President-hopeful Donald Trump decried it as a way of letting China into a free trade zone – before being told that our sovereign nation is not actually one of the Partners.
Not to be outdone, the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; established in June, with 57 members worldwide) is China’s answer to the World Bank. It will provide funding for infrastructure projects in developing countries, with the useful side effect of spreading emerging market (i.e. Chinese) influence.
The ADB (Asian Development Bank; established 1966; 67 members) was established to do the same thing but it is now regarded as being dominated by Japan, who got there first.
Fighting for airtime is the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations; est. 1967; 10 nations) which last weekend established the AEC (ASEAN Economic Community), a single market with a free flow of goods, capital and labour modelled on the European Union. It may be “a community that is politically cohesive, economically integrated and socially responsible” but there is also an urgent desire to bulk up in the face of the brewing dispute in the South China Sea.