The BRF that was held this year on May 14-15 aimed for the revival of the ancient network of trade routes that connected East and West of Eurasia and from which China benefited so much.
As the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is a well known partisan of globalisation, the Belt and Road Initiative targets an open world economy and trade liberalization.
“The glory of the ancient Silk Road shows that geographical dispersion is not insurmountable” he told the audience at the event that took place in Beijing.
The BRF managed to gather 29 heads of state including Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan. Although G7 and OECD leaders skipped the summit as well as most EU leaders apart from some estern European heads of state or government, they did dispatch lower-ranking representatives to the event.
Xi’s $900bn infrastructure extravaganza was of course well welcomed by some of the world leaders, as their countries will benefit from it as well.
Still, India not only skipped BRF, but also, according to Times of India, backlashed saying that the Chinese so called “project of the century” is “little more than a colonial enterprise that would leave debt and broken communities in its wake”.
India accused China of neocolonialism saying that this kind of plan will create an “unsustainable debt burden for communities” and infringe upon other countries’ sovereignty and also that such initiatives “must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality”.
India was mostly angered by the New Silk Road’s associated project, a $55bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through some territory claimed by New Delhi.