China's Middle Kingdom dream offers opportunities for the taking
Andrew Leung says, when completed, new East-West links will truly place China at the global centre
China's rent-seeking decades have yielded massive systemic corruption, and recent revelations of cases of power abuse have shaken the Communist Party to the core. The nation's unbalanced, uncoordinated, unstable and unsustainable development is threatening its very survival.
President Xi Jinping has forged a party consensus that it's crunch time for China to sink or swim. What's more, he has raised the bar by launching a global infrastructural blueprint that puts China at the centre of the world through land and sea links.
This is calculated to restore the Middle Kingdom's historical place in the world's pecking order in a new China Dream.
In addition to reforms announced at the party's third and fourth plenums for a more balanced and equitable society, Xi has unveiled a vision of renaissance supported by a 21st-century New Silk Road.
This consists of a maritime Silk Road linking Fuzhou on the east coast, through Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, to Nairobi in Kenya, then, traversing the Red Sea, on to Athens, ending in Venice.
This route will connect to an overland "Silk Road economic belt" from Venice to Duisburg in Germany, through Moscow, Istanbul, Tehran, to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, onwards to Urumqi in Xinjiang and all the way to Xian in the Chinese heartland.