Macroscope | Reshaping the World Order through ‘One Belt, One Road’

A couple of years ago I joined a small business mission to Beijing that met in the vast sterile opulence of the Great Hall of the People with one of the Chinese leadership’s top figures – discretion suggests I should not say exactly who.

After usual pleasantries, hot towels, and liberal servings of tea, the leader began briefing: “China has had a challenging 100 years…”.

I choked into my tea in astonishment. What Western leader would ever begin a briefing asking us to recall the work of a century? You would be lucky to get any leader to focus on any longer period than five years – often much less.

I lost the next few sentences as I digested in awe what I had just heard. Only in Beijing will you get leaders with the vision, or inclination, to review and assess policy over such vast oceans of political time.

I had the same feeling last year when I first heard Xi Jinping drop on us the concept of “One Belt, One Road”. It is a concept tailored to those vast oceans of political time. It is nonsensical - or at least thoroughly mundane - when viewed through the prism of normal run-of-the-mill politics, where even a week is a long time.

Why nonsensical or mundane? The concept embraces a sprawling grab-bag of more than 60 economies at the last count, amounting to over 60 per cent of the world’s population, and over 46 per cent of global GDP, but sharing almost nothing in common.