Name: Sameh El-Shahat, President, China-i Limited

Title: Xi'an: The Media's Role and Objectives in the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative is an ambitious proposal to reconnect the world in a new way based on an old tried and test way. What do I mean by that?

China’s impact on the world’s economy over the last 45 years of reform and opening up cannot be understated. China has simply changed the world for the better by using its economic potential. Hundreds of millions have been raised out of poverty in China and throughout the globe and ensuring continuing stability for all of us wherever we may be.

In autumn 2013, President Xi Jinping brought up the initiative of jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Essentially, “the Belt” includes countries situated on the original Silk Road through Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The genius of the idea soon caught on and the rest is history. Since then, we have had the creation of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Silk Road Fund, and many countries have signalled their interest in being part of this historic initiative we now know as the Belt and Road Initiative.

The Belt and Road Initiative has excellent pedigree. It is the genetic descendent of the Silk Road, the world’s first common market of goods, services and ideas. For thousands of years, China was interconnected with the Middle East and Europe via a complex system known as the Silk Road. It was made up of caravans, trading outposts, and cities where merchants, travellers and scholars plied their trade and ideas from China to Egypt and all the way to Rome. It worked for thousands of years and was eventually disrupted by the onset of colonialism and the modern age.

Now with Asia as the global economic engine, China has offered a vision of a new way to reconnect the world based on peace and development for the formalisation of a tried and tested albeit ad hoc blueprint. But much has changed since the ancient Silk Road. Connectivity is a very importance concept often cited with the Belt and Road Initiative, stressing the essential nature of infrastructure. But for these countries to be physically interconnected and for a successful interlinking of their economies to take place, there needs to be a deeper kind of social connectivity, one of ideas and people, between countries with some marked cultural differences. Connectivity of ideas means

the removal or at least minimization of obstacles to the communication necessary to the creation of a base of shared values and shared development that can lead to connectivity on other levels. Without such a connectivity, the Belt and Road Initiative would be prey to considerable strategic risks. When we talk about ideas, we talk of values and we cannot avoid talking of the media. In today’s world, the media is the foremost purveyor of ideas and values and its role is what we shall be assessing here. We propose that Xi’an play a decisive communication role as a media hub for the Belt and Road.

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