During the last four decades, China experienced impressive economic growth, becoming one of the leading powers of the global economy. After a century of humiliation imposed by Western and Japanese colonial powers, today the country is demonstrating a strong desire to achieve its national rejuvenation (guojia fuxing).
Xi Jinping visit to Italy poses many questions, also because it takes place in a particularly delicate time of global challenges, among trade wars, race competition for technological supremacy and debates on the protection of strategic sectors. Thus, what opportunities can the Belt and Road Initiative offer to Italy? And what would be its political costs, especially regarding Europe-US relations?
With more than 136 countries (end-July 2019) reported to have signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI hereafter) since it was announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, estimates for China's potential BRI investments vary significantly, from around US $1 trillion to as much as US $8 trillion.
The Middle East is a fundamentally unstable area of the world. Threats to regional stability have regularly emerged both from disputes between governments and from internal forces within countries. This is likely to continue for decades to come. Looking ahead, however, the region’s stability will be increasingly threatened by relatively new, largely external dynamics. The most important of these will be the interplay of three ongoing and unfinished transitions: the rise of Chinese regional influence, the prospect of US regional retrenchment, and the changing global strategic approach of
The Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) has its strategic location between three important seas—the Mediterranean, Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, which are of vital importance for China’s trade and oil routes. China’s long, traditional cooperation with the MENA region focuses on energy, but is politically based on foreign policies and principles similar to those pertaining to other countries.
Can China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) help resolve some of the conflicts in the Middle East? Could it provide the means for building peace in the region? Such questions may become more pressing in the coming years. Over the past decade the Middle East has become less stable, the result of relative American military and economic decline alongside weak and collapsing regional states which were more exposed to insurgent and radical groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Following President Xi’s visits to Kazakhstan and to South East Asia in 2013, China unveiled its grand Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with two main components, namely the “Silk Road Economic Belt” (SREB), a network of transporation starting from China, encompassing several Euroasian countries on its way, ending in Europe; and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” (MSR) connecting China and Europe via South-East Asia, South Asia and Africa.
While Balkans-China relations have deepened in a number of policy areas over the last decade, two particular forms of interaction have been most visible and talked about: a) cooperation on large-scale infrastructure projects undertaken by the Balkan governments, funded via Chinese loans, implemented by contracting Chinese state-owned enterprises (with the notable exception of the Pjelešac Bridge in Croatia, which is financed primarily by EU funds); and b) Chinese greenfield and brownfield investments in other infrastructure assets as well as manufacturing capacities in the
La prima edizione dell'Italian Export Forum si è svolta a Piano di Sorrento (Napoli) il 14 e il 15 giugno 2019.
Nell'ambito dell'iniziativa, organizzata anche con il supporto di ISPI, si è tenuto il workshop "Come chiudere un deal di successo all’estero", che ha visto tra i relatori Alessia Amighini, Co-Head Asia Centre e Senior Associate Research Fellow, ISPI e Alessandro Terzulli, Chief Economist, Sace.
The "Indo-Pacific" is a strategic construct that arose at a time of a potential transition in the Asian security order.
