Fang Cai, Nolan Peter (ed.) Routledge Handbook of The Belt and Road

Routledge, 2019. — 644 p. — ISBN 978-04292-03039The countries of the world are at dif f erent stages of development and have their own dif f erent histories and cultures, but the people of all countries share a common desire for peace and development. It is also the goal and constant commitment of the ruler of every country to raise the country’s economic and social development level with a view to bringing people out of poverty and improving their quality of life. Meanwhile, people tend to agree that a country should also accommodate the legitimate concerns of others when seeking its own development and the common development of all countries is the only way for a country to achieve its sus-tainable development. Since Comrade Xi Jinping was elected the president of China in 2013, he has consistently advocated and made profound interpretations of the idea of building a commu-nity of shared future for mankind, which has quickly gained widespread recognition from the international community. The idea itself has also been recorded in a series of UN resolutions.
A desire for common development does not mean the pursuit of a single path, nor does it entail a single model. Instead, it allows diversif i ed and localised development paths that keep abreast with the times. However, all countries also face common obstacles in their development, such as a bottleneck of capital accumulation, inequality in international economic and trade relations, low infrastructure capacity, dif f i culties in cultivating human capital, and low mobilisa-tion capability and inef f i cient allocation of human resources. Therefore, while acknowledging and encouraging diversif i ed models, all countries around the world, especially the developing countries, are also desperate for a strategic framework for development that not only helps to create the necessary conditions for development, breaking the bottlenecks in key areas and learning from success or failure, but also gives each country an adequate space of choice. The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 is such an open framework.