BRI a story of commerce, connectivity and culture

The Belt and Road Initiative was first proposed by President Xi Jinping at the Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in September 2013. In November 2014, when our bank's vice-chairman was in town, a journalist from Hong Kong asked him his view on the BRI. With great humility, he turned and asked, "what is BRI?"

So much has changed since. In November 2017, Francis Yeoh, chairman of Malaysia-based YTL conglomerate gave a speech on the initiative at the Fortune 500 Forum. Yeoh compared the initiative with the Marshall Plan, where massive funds were set aside to rebuild Europe after World War II, with the focus on infrastructure. Granted, the analogy is far from perfect as the Marshall Plan was conceived immediately after WWII while the BRI has come up during peacetime. Yet, Yeoh's speech galvanized us all, builders, bankers, policymakers.

In 2019, Bruno Macaes, a geopolitical expert, published a book on the initiative, titled Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order. In it, a former Portugal writes that "the best image of the Belt and Road is not the trains crossing the Eurasia supercontinent, or the ports and industrial parks opening up along the way. It's the cities being built up from scratch. These are what will change the physical and human landscape of the planet, creating new ways of life, new ideas, new adventures". Stephen Green, former chairman of HSBC, recommends Macaes' book as "essential reading for us all."