In August last year a top Chinese economist, Zhang Yuyan, director of the Institute of World Economy and Politics of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, delivered a lecture at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati City, during a forum on “The Role of China in Global Economic Affairs”.
In his talk, Professor Yuyan said “huge opportunities” are available for trade, investments and people-to-people exchanges between the Philippines and China with the ambitious 21st Century Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road projects, which Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled in 2013 and began to implement the next year, with main focus on infrastructure development.
The Silk Road or Silk Route was an ancient network of trade routes that also facilitated cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent and connected the East and West from China to the Mediterranean Sea.
The 21st Century Silk Road Economic Belt now aims to connect China with Central Asia, Russia and the Baltic countries in Europe; with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and West Asia; and with Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean.
The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, on the other hand, seeks to link China’s coast with Europe via two routes—one through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the other from China’s coast through the South China Sea to the South Pacific.
At present, more than 100 countries and international organizations are participating in the project, with 30 of them having signed agreements with China on jointly implementing the strategy. More than 20 countries have worked with China in such areas as railway construction and nuclear-power generation.
Bilateral trade between China and countries situated along the Belt and Road reached $995.5 billion in 2015. This figure represents 25 percent of the national total. China has also expanded the scope of 50 overseas economic cooperation areas.
Also last year, Chinese companies infused direct investments in 29 countries along the Belt and Road totaling $14.82 billion, or an increase of 18.2 percent over the previous year and accounting for 12.6 percent of the total.
In a bid to explain the Belt and Road project to its neighbors in the Asean, the Chinese government, through the State Council Information Office in coordination with the Asean-China Center (ACC) and staff of China Report, which is part of the China International Publishing Group, conducted a tour of two central China provinces, Hunan and Jiangxi, for 20 journalists from the 10 member-states of Asean, namely, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The 2017 media visit is actually the third of a series that started in 2015. The visits are intended to show to Asean journalists what the various provinces in China can offer as their contributions to the One Belt, One Road project.
I was fortunate enough to have been invited to join the visit along with two broadcast journalists. We arrived in Guangzhou via China Southern Airlines toward noon of Monday, April 17. From the airport, our guides from China Report brought us, along with the other Asean journalists, to the train station where we were booked to take a high-speed train to Changsha, capital of Hunan province. The train navigated the nearly 700-kilometer distance in just two-and-a-half hours. The late-afternoon high-speed train ride through the Chinese countryside offered us a first glimpse into the rapid economic development of China since the late 1970s up to the present.
The next day, our group started our three-day trip through Hunan province with an early morning visit to the Changsha headquarters of SANY Group, which is engaged in heavy equipment manufacturing. Established in 1989, SANY manufactures various kinds of machinery used in the construction, port, mining and petroleum industries, among others. This was followed by another visit to the Hunan Leopard Automobile Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the Changfeng Group, a mainstay of Hunan’s vehicle manufacturing industry. It builds the indigenous vehicle brand “Leopaard”—that’s a double “a”—with a range of passenger vehicles from sedans to sports utility vehicles that rival the more established Japanese and Korean brands.
In the afternoon, we proceeded to the headquarters of the Sunward Group, another company that manufactures construction machinery. The Sunward Group, founded in 1999, is among the world’s top 50 construction machinery manufacturers and among the top 20 of excavation machinery makers. They have already established a presence in the Philippines.
Afterward, we were ushered to the Hunan Broadcasting System (HBS), where we were given a brief tour of the facilities. The HBS produces news and feature stories on developments in both the local and national scenes, as well as television dramas that depict the daily lives of people in China.
To be continued
E-mail: ernhil@yahoo.com.
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