This [One Belt, One Road initiative (B&R)] is not new. It started more than one thousand years ago during the Han dynasty. Now we have the continuation. The B&R initiative is a new type of China’s foreign policy,” said Professor Zhou Hong, the current professor of European Politics and Modern History and former Director of the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
The scholar spoke during the keynote speech that opened the Workshop on Contemporary Relations between China and Central and Eastern Europe, organized by the European Union Academic Program – Macao (EUAP-M), taking place at the University of Macau (UM) on Friday and Saturday.
During the keynote speech, Zhou drew a conceptual map of the ideas underlying the initiative and highlighted its importance not only for China’s foreign policy but also as an “internal balance policy.”
“This is an initiative also to balance China’s own development, because in China we also have an East-West relation to solve,” Zhou said, adding that “the Eastern areas of China have been developing far faster than the ones in the West regions.”
Professor Zhou recalled that economists and even Chinese President Xi Jinping have supported the R&B initiative, stating that “it is a natural extension of the development of China’s economic path because we have all learned that Chinese proverb, ‘If you want to get rich, you have to build roads first’ and ‘building roads’ basically means linking yourself to a bigger market.”
Zhou also reminded that although people used to put the focus of the initiative on China, “this is no one-way street,” as “interests and efforts have to come from both sides,” bringing attention to the shared benefits and challenges amongst all countries involved. He also recalled that “434 years ago Matteo Ricci was successful in establishing contacts between Western Europe and China because he was well prepared, had the knowledge and had studied well the field to where he was heading.”
According to Zhou, the “R&B initiative came in a time of dramatic changes within the European Union [EU],” recalling how the map of Europe has been changing and how in a short period of time EU members passed from eight to 28.
Krzysztof Sliwinski, a Polish national and associate professor at the Department of Government and International Studies of Hong Kong Baptist University shared similar sentiments. Speaking to the Times during the workshop, Sliwinski mentioned that the statistics of mutual trade show clearly an “approach” of China with most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, He stated that “mutual cooperation between both parties has been growing at least in the past 6 years,” adding that an increase in relations has worked as a “win-win for both and namely the so-called 16 countries in Central and East Europe that were hit pretty hard by the Euro-crisis.” In his opinion, these countries saw in China “some sort of economic backup” that they were not getting from the EU, raising tensions within the European Union.
“Traditional central Europe powers such has Germany or France are not too happy that countries they call ‘junior partners’ from their perspective, which include countries such as Czech Republic, Poland or Hungary, could have their own bilateral relations with China,” Sliwinski noted.
Also at the EUAP-M workshop, Senior Researcher from the National Institute of Economic Research of Bucharest, Iulia Oehler-Sincai, said that although the relations between Romania and China go back for centuries, the country’s political cycles caused disruption. “Some political parties are clearly more supportive of the relations with China while others are more on the side of the Western European countries and it’s important to find the balance.”
As she mentioned, “after Greece we are the second most strategically located country and China benefits from that as we are served by several Pan-European corridors. But we also need infrastructure. We are still lacking in high-speed railways and highways to link Eastern and Western Europe and China could offer that to us.”
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