By Xuefei Chen Axelsson

STOCKHOLM, March 28(Greenpost)– A lot of people simply understands Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative as that China has over capacity in infrastructure construction, so China wants to sell out their over capacity.

Yes, without any extra capacity, one cannot do anything for export. But there is a deeper intention in the infrastructure construction.

The world faces a lot of challenges due to the backward of the productivity. The backward productivity was due to poor infrastructure. Over 40 years development in China, we found roads and transport are very important for development.

In 2000, when I came back from Zimbabwe, I went back via Paris and and I took Paris metro. At that time I thought if only Beijing had such kind of metro that can direct to many places!  At that time Beijing only had one line and the round line, only two lines. By 2008, Beijing has many subway lines. Now it has 14 lines. You can go anywhere by subways.

Also you can drive anywhere by car because the road has linked the city and the countryside.

But this development was not seen in many countries such as central Asia or Africa.  With Chinese efforts a lot of places are linked with roads. With good roads, people are easy to do business.

China has a slogan, Yao Xiang Fu, Xian Xiu Lu. If you like to be rich, you should first build roads.  Roads link people and with people’s link, you can build a market and demand.

China holds that basic infrastructure can help development.  Then Belt and Road Initiative is not just limited to infrastructure construction. It can be education, it can be culture, it can be medicare and innovation. As long as any idea that is conducive to development and improving people’s living standards, it will be good.

Ancient Chinese people move from China to Europe via land silk road and sea silk road.  The reason it is called  silk road is that it used to transport silk, porslin and tea to Europe from China.  But the road was not very good. Now China likes to develop together with other countries to build good road and other things.

People likes to ask why do you do that? What is your purpose? What kind of profit can you get? If you really dig up that, one can say that once you have the infrastructure, one can trade.  But a lot of times, people just think as long as we can do something together, it will be good. As long as there is demand, we like to meet it.

China is a great country. That has a big capacity of helping each other. In stead of launching a war, China likes to construct and develop with other countries.  Chinese people has such a mindset that we human being should help each other and joint hands to deal with climate issues and other challenges mankind face.

So I think belt and road initiative can be any subject and can be along the silk road, and can be not along the silk road.