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President Xi Stresses the Belt and Road Initiative as a New Form of Global Governance
27 August 2018
FROM EIR DAILY ALERT EIRNS—Speaking today at a symposium on the Belt and Road Initiative to commemorate the fifth anniversary of its inception on Sept. 7, 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping underlined its importance as the basis of a new type of global governance. “In the past five years, the ‘One Belt and One Road’ has greatly improved the level of China’s trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, and promoted China’s open space from the coast, along the river to the inland, along the border, forming a new open pattern of land and sea linkage, east and west mutual aid,” Xi said. “The trade volume of goods with the countries related to the Belt and Road has accumulated more than $5 trillion, and the direct foreign investment has exceeded $60 billion, creating more than 200,000 jobs for the local economies. China’s foreign investment has become an important factor driving the growth of global foreign direct investment.” Xi pointed out that the world today is undergoing a period of great development, great change, and adjustment. “We must have a strategic vision and establish a global outlook. We must have both a sense of risk and a sense of history, and we must have a sense of historical opportunity to work hard in this century-old change. ... Building a community of human destiny with the ‘One Belt and One Road’ as a platform for practice, is proposed from the perspective of China’s reform and opening up, and long-term development. It is also in line with the Chinese philosophy that the Chinese nation has always upheld, in line with the Chinese people’s concept of harmony under heaven and occupies the commanding heights of international morality. Building the Belt and Road is not only a means of economic cooperation, but also an important way to improve the global development model and global governance and promote the healthy development of economic globalization,” Xi said. “We must work hard to open up the market, build more trade promotion platforms, guide powerful enterprises to carry out investment cooperation with the countries along the Belt and Road, develop new trades and new modes of cross-border e-commerce, and pay attention to trade balance. We must work hard on financial security, speed up the formation of financial support and build a ‘One Belt, One Road’ policy system, promote the internationalization of the RMB [currency] in an orderly manner, guide social funds to jointly invest in national infrastructure and resource development projects along the route, and provide foreign exchange funds for enterprises going global,” he said. SEE ALSO: Extending the Belt and Road Will Become a Major Theme on Its Fifth Anniversary
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