The New Chinese Trade Routes
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
The most representative project of Chinese President Xi Jinping is his expansion policy called ‘Yidai Yilis’ which means’ a belt of a road’ consisting of land routes that pass through Russia, Central Asia and Pakistan to Eastern Europe, in addition to the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ linking the oceans of Southeast and South Asia, Africa and South America. According to Xi Jinping, they are inspired by peace and cooperation to achieve global coexistence.
Chinese historian Zhao Suisheng, a researcher at the University of Denver, notes that this project is based on the myth of an imperial China that ensures harmony and regional stability rather than the force used by European powers to establish colonies worldwide, believing that their military actions were just and benevolent. This ‘new silk route’ is supported by 65 countries on all continents and it will will change the old system of colonization.
This May, Xi Jinping opened the New Silk Road Forum in Beijing before more than 30 world leaders who expressed their support. At that Forum, Xi Jinping linked the Chinese projects of high-speed railways, ports, logistics hubs and other infrastructure with the old Silk Road of 2000 years ago which started in China and linked the East and the West commercially and culturally. He is also proposing that other countries join the project, both financially and through construction companies, assuming that China will bear the main weight of the cost, and he announced an additional injection of nearly 70 billion dollars into the project.
Xi Jinping’s global economic integration project seeks to go beyond the great political and economic influence that the United States achieved with the Marshall Plan in the middle of the last century after winning in World War II when they financed the Reconstruction of a destroyed Europe with a massive amount of aid and a supply of troops. In the forum, the director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde also gave her approval to the Chinese president’s project but insisted that the investment in infrastructure should respect the environment and improve ties with countries that are now isolated. So we are already in a new multipolar world, although this does not guarantee the peace and prosperity of the world.
To put the icing on the cake, China took a completely unexpected action, creating for the first time in history a secret naval base in Djibouti, right at the key location to monitor and regulate the operations of the Saudi emirs who control operations around Saudi Arabia. Although the capacity of China’s new maritime base is unknown, one is seeing a flow of huge warships with platforms to launch warplanes and a large number of submarines that are housed inside the huge base, and no one knows whether they are already controlling the bottom of the seas surrounding the Arabian Peninsula.
Although the world is now going through one of the most critical moments in its history with multiple spaces where a military conflict can arise in no time, and the United States has as its president a mentally ill individual who has no idea what it means to lead a nation, it is possible that the bureaucratic apparatus of the military and lawyers who are actually running the country may be able to avoid military clashes with China and accept that they are no longer the world’s only leaders in order to create a new multipolar world order without violence.
There is every reason to suppose that the present political, diplomatic and geographical operations of the world have ceased to function, and it is very likely that there will be a breakdown not only on the continents but also within many countries whose different regions no longer accept their rulers. The same thing will happen with the obsolete educational processes that came into being hundreds of years ago, with health systems, with religions, with universities and even with sporting competitions.
There will also be radical changes at the level of the family, where the concept of monogamous marriage between people of different sexes is already unravelling , and a new and complex multisexual world is emerging, with couples of all kinds and the disappearance of the fundamental purpose of preserving the human species. Feelings are being restrained and an indirect way of facing reality is being created through the instruments produced by the new digital world.
Addendum: We can only say that we are already living in a different world that is now trying to adapt to a new reality. But there is no doubt that the fundamental elements of human society will persist. The traditional behaviors of the human being will remain, filled with selfishness but with some love and residual moral conscience. There is also no doubt that new manifestations of art and social and cultural coexistence will emerge given that humankind has never been able to live without stories and without myths.