Whats in the news - CHINA BELT INITIATIVE
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has grown from a scheme evoking the ancient Afro-Eurasian silk roads, aimed at boosting regional trade corridors and cooperation, into a template for global connectivity. As well as creating infrastructure to bolster trade and commerce, it seeks to support Chinese priorities such as policy coordination, connectivity, financial integration and cultural connections. It is arguably the most ambitious development strategy ever.
At its simplest, BRI is an umbrella term for extraterritorial Chinese participation in the creation of ‘traditional’ infrastructure, such as roads, ports and power stations. In a stereotypical BRI deal, a Chinese entity finances an infrastructure project which is typically then undertaken by Chinese contractors. This model has already delivered infrastructure worth hundreds of billions of dollars, often in countries which have previously found it challenging to finance such projects. However, amid concern in some capitals about the expansion of Chinese influence, BRI has also evolved to encompass a far wider range of infrastructure developments.
Over the past year, aspects of BRI such as the Health Silk Road and the Digital Silk Road have attracted increasing amounts of attention, boosted respectively by China’s provision of medical equipment and vaccines to many BRI countries, and by its successes in implementing tech systems ranging from telecoms and cloud computing to mobile banking and surveillance systems.
Other concepts still unfamiliar in the West, like the Polar Silk Road (creating new routes across the Arctic as the ice retreats) and the Silk Road in the Air (developing airfreight infrastructure) are well-established in China and figure in its latest Five-Year Plan. The Space Silk Road is an ambitious attempt to become a global space power, centred on the BeiDou satellite navigation system. Panama Leaks
Panama Leaks
It is the biggest leak in history, dwarfing the data released by the Wikileaks organisation in 2010. For context, if the amount of data released by Wikileaks was equivalent to the population of San Francisco, the amount of data released in the Panama Papers is the equivalent to that of India. The papers include 12 current or former heads of state and government in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries. More than 60 relatives and associates of heads of state and other politicians are also implicated. The 11.5m documents were obtained by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then worked with journalists from 107 media organisations in 76 countries, including UK newspaper the Guardian, to analyse the documents over a year.