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It’s not a gas – time for Europe to stand up to US hawks on Russia

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

Will the new tough sanctions package on Russia passed almost unanimously by Congress and awaiting the signature of President Trump be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the European Union?

The bill, which also targets Iran and North Korea, not only expands sanctions against Russia and potentially throws a massive spanner in the works of the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, but also seeks to limit the president’s ability to ease, or lift the sanctions in the future. The message from the neocon dominated Congress is clear: Russia must be kept in the ’sin-bin’(until of course a nice ‘liberal’ who will do everything the hawks in Washington demand comes to power), and economic/business links between Europe and Russia must be broken.

European leaders, many of whom would like to see sanctions on Russia eased have been quick to voice their disapproval. They know the huge cost to their economies the sanctions and Russian countermeasures have had, €4 billion to Italy alone, and further escalation of financial warfare with the Kremlin would be utterly disastrous.

Why should European companies and workers suffer because of the anti-Russian obsession of the American elites? Do we honestly think the US would impose sanctions on a country to its great economic detriment if European countries demanded it? You can literally bet your bottom dollar that they wouldn’t.

“I think the US sanctions are absolutely unacceptable. You can’t mix up political and economic interests, at the expense of European jobs,” was the angry verdict of Austria’s Chancellor Christian Kern.

‘‘Sanctions against Russia should not become a tool of industrial policy in US interests,” said Martin Schaefer, spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry.

“America First cannot mean that Europe’s interests come last,”declared EU President, Jean-Claude Juncker.

Alas, that’s what’s been happening for some time now – and Donald Trump has nothing to do with it.

The sad truth is that since the era of strong, independently-minded leaders such as Charles de Gaulle, Olof Palme, and Bruno Kreisky, Europe HAS subordinated its interests to that of the US and lobbies operating in the US.

Take the 2012 EU sanctions on Iran. At first, Europe resisted pressure from the US (and the pro-Israel lobby), to impose an oil embargo on Tehran over an unproven nuclear weapons program. They eventually succumbed – to great cost to EU member states such as Greece, Spain, and Italy who benefited from the importation of cheaper Iranian oil.

So often in recent years, Europeans have been left picking up the tab for neocon policies.

Consider the refugee crisis. This has been caused in large part due to US-led ‘wars of intervention’ in the Middle East and elsewhere. The vast majority of refugees heading to Europe are coming from countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria, which have either been attacked or invaded by the US or where Washington has backed proxy forces to topple the governments. Of course, imperialistic European countries, under craven ’Atlanticist’ leadership, have played a key role in these conflicts too, with Britain particularly culpable and France too, in regards to the destruction of Libya.

While some European countries, like Germany, have opened their doors quite widely to refugees fleeing the war zones the US has lagged some way behind.

“The US accepts far fewer Syrian refugees than other Western countries,” notes the Guardian.

Now lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to hit European pockets even harder. Congress is clearly out to sabotage the Nord Stream-2 pipeline, with its proposal the US would be able to sanction any company which was involved in the maintenance or development of Russia’s energy export pipelines.

“This bill, if it comes into force, would allow measures against European natural or juridical persons for situations that have no connection with the United States,” declared a statement from the French Foreign Ministry.

Of course, that’s utterly outrageous. But again it’s not without precedent. In 1996 Congress passed the Iran and Libyan Sanctions Act, giving the US the right to impose economic sanctions on firms doing business with those two countries. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996 also penalized foreign companies that did business in Cuba, by preventing them doing business in the US.

It’s not enough the US sanctions countries it doesn’t like, everyone else has to join in too. Or else.

Apologists for 21st-century imperialism would call this “fighting for democracy and human rights.” Straight-talkers would call it what it is: bullying.

We only have to follow the money trail to see who benefits from all of this. If European-Russian energy projects are scuppered, US gas companies, offering more expensive liquefied natural gas, would be the big winners.

Back in June, the first US natural gas was shipped to Poland. “The United States is in a position to start aggressively marketing gas exports to Europe because of its “”fracking revolution,”…After decades of consuming nearly all of the energy it produced, the United States is now expected to become the world’s third-largest exporter of gas by 2020,”enthuses the CIA-seed funded, RFE/RL.

This desire, to dominate Europe’s energy market, and the childish desire of hawks in Congress to get Donald Trump to ‘prove’ he is not a ‘Russian agent’ by signing a bill that will kill off any hopes of better relations between Washington and Moscow, is the background to the new sanctions legislation.

If Europe doesn’t oppose it forcefully, then it’s effectively signing up to its own assisted suicide. Moscow has already said it doesn’t rule out any measures ‘to bring the US to its senses’- and as a first step has ordered the US to reduce its embassy staff in Moscow to 455 people (from about 1,100) and to stop using storage facilities.

Do EU leaders want to join in with foaming-at-the-mouth US neocons and ’liberal hawks’ in their fanatical crusade against Russia? Again, if war does break out, as some seem to want, it’ll be Europe that takes the biggest hit, and not the US.

It’s not hard to find historical parallels. The subservient EU relationship to Washington in recent decades can be compared to the ’Dual Monarchy’ of Austria-Hungary which officially came into being in 1867. While Vienna and Budapest had ’equal’ status, it was clear who called the shots – literally. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914, it was the Hungarians who urged caution. Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Istvan Tisza, was opposed to any military assault on Serbia without prior diplomatic action and opposed giving Belgrade a list of demands that would be impossible to fulfill. In the end, he capitulated – and the Great War started.

“Tisza resisted for a fortnight,” notes historian Peter Hanak. “In spite of this though, Austrian and German politicians, together with the military, finally convinced him that the time was now ripe for the Central Powers to go to war. Any delay would only serve the interests of the Entente-made up of the ‘enemies’: France, Britain, and Russia.”

The result was a catastrophe not just for Hungary, which lost around two-thirds of its territory, but the whole of Europe. And, in October 1918, Tisza, the man who had caved-in to external pressure, against his own country’s best interests, was shot dead after angry soldiers and workers broke into his house.

As in 1914, Europe is now at a critical point in its history. Will its leaders ‘do a Tisza’ and surrender to the war-hawks, or will they resist the pressure to agree- or acquiesce- to an anti-Russian, anti-European policy which they know is not in their countries’ interests? The next few weeks will tell us all.

Twitter @NeilClark66

The Eurasian Century Is NOW Unstoppable

The transfer of the geopolitical center of gravity to Eurasia is something the West will have to get used to

William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, “New Eastern Outlook”

I recently returned from a fascinating two week speaking tour in China. The occasion was the international premier of my newest book, One Belt, One Road–China and the New Eurasian Century.

In the course of my visit I was invited by China’s Northwest University in Xi’an to give a lecture and seminar on the present global political and economic situation in the context of China’s New Economic Silk Road as the One Belt, One Road project is often called.

What I’ve seen in my many visits to China, and have studied about the entirety of this enormously impressive international infrastructure project convinces me that a Eurasian Century at this point is unstoppable.

The idiotic wars of the Washington war-hawks and their military industry–in Syria, in Ukraine, Libya, Iraq and now the South China Sea provocations against China–are not going to stop what is now clearly the most impressive and economically altering project in more than a century.

The term “American Century” was triumphantly proclaimed in a famous editorial in Life magazine in 1941 in the early phase of World War II, before the United States had even entered the war, to describe the system publisher Henry Luce saw dominating the postwar world after the fall of the rival British Empire.

The American Century has lasted a mere seven decades if we date from the end of the war. Its record has been one of dismal failure on balance. The industrial base of the United States, the predominant leading industrial nation and leading scientific innovator, today is a hollowed, rotted shell with once-booming cities like Detroit or Philadelphia or Los Angeles now burned-out ghettos of unemployed and homeless.

The Federal Debt of the United States, owing to the endless wars its Presidents engage in, as well as the fruitless bailouts of Wall Street banks and Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie Mae, is well over 103% of GDP at an astonishing $19.5 trillion, or more than $163,000 per taxpaying American and Washington is adding to the debt this year at near $600 billion. Countries like China and Russia are moving away from subsidizing that debt at a record pace.

America’s economic basic infrastructure–bridges, sewer and water treatment plants, electric grid, railways, highways–have been neglected for more than four decades for a variety of reasons.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recently estimated that gross domestic product will be reduced by $4 trillion between 2016 and 2025 because of lost business sales, rising costs and reduced incomes if the country continues to underinvest in its infrastructure. That is on top of the fact that they estimate the country at present urgently requires new infrastructure investment of $3.3 trillion by the coming decade just to renew.

Yet US states and cities are not able to finance such an investment in the future in the present debt situation, nor is the debt-choked Federal Government, so long as a cartel of corrupt brain-dead Wall Street banks and financial funds hold America to ransom.

This is the sunset for the American Century, a poorly disguised imperial experiment in hubris and arrogance by a gaggle of boring old patriarchs like David Rockefeller and his friends on Wall Street and in the military industry. It is the starkest contrast to what is going on to the east, across all Eurasia today.

Flowing the Thought to Transform

The Eurasian Century is the name I give to the economic emergence of the countries contiguous from China across Central Asia, Russia, Belarus, Iran and potentially Turkey. They are being integrally linked through the largest public infrastructure projects in modern history, in fact the most ambitious ever, largely concentrated on the 2013 initiative by Chinese President Xi Jinping called the One Belt, One Road initiative or OBOR.

The project and its implications for Europe and the rest of the world economy have been so far greeted in the west with a stone silence that defies explanation.

It’s been now three years that have transpired since then-new Chinese President Xi Jinping made one of his first foreign visits to Kazakhstan where he discussed the idea of building a vast, modern network of high-speed train lines crossing the vast Eurasian land space from the Pacific coast of China and Russia through Central Asia into Iran, into the states of the Eurasian Economic Union, principally Russia and potentially on to the select states of the European Union.

That initial proposal was unveiled in detail last year by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s economic planning organization, and the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Commerce.

It’s a useful point to look now more closely at what has transpired to date. It reveals most impressive developments, more because the development process is creative and organic. The great project is no simple blueprint made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and then simply imposed, top down, across the so-far 60 countries of Eurasia and South East Asia.

An international conference was recently held in Xi’an, origin of the ancient version of One Belt, One Road, namely the Silk Road. The purpose of the international gathering was to review what has so far taken place.

It’s fascinating, notably, in the care that’s being taken by China to do it in a different way, as indications so far are, different from the way American Robber Barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, Jay Gould or Russell Sage built rail monopolies and deluded and defrauded investors with railroad monopolies more than a century ago.

The seminar, titled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Shared Memory and Common Development, on September 26th, brought together over 400 participants from more than 30 countries including government officials, universities, corporations, think tanks and media.

A key role is being played by Renmin University of China’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies to identify progress and problems of the OBOR project. Their report in Xi’an presented principles underlying the OBOR international project: It adheres to the principles of the UN Charter; it is completely open for new participant nations to cooperate; it will follow market rules and seek mutual benefit of participating countries.

Those are noble words. What’s more interesting is the flow process underway to realize such words and to build the mammoth game-changing infrastructure.

Notably, China’s Xi Jinping decided to encourage input from sources other than the state central planning agency or the Communist Party for the complex OBOR. He encouraged creation of private and independent think-tanks to become a source of new creative ideas and approaches.

Today there is a Chinese Think Tank Cooperation Alliance group coordinating efforts around OBOR headed by the dean of the Renmin University. In turn they partner with think tanks along the OBOR route including think tanks in Iran, Turkey, India, Nepal, Kazakhstan and other countries.

There will be two main routes of the OBOR. On land there are several routes or corridors in work. The Initiative will focus on jointly building what is being called a new Eurasian Land Bridge from China via Kazakhstan on to Rotterdam. Other OBOR land rail corridors include developing China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central Asia-West Asia, China-Pakistan, Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar, and China-Indochina Peninsula economic corridors.vThis is huge.

It will build on international transport routes, relying on core cities along the OBOR route and using key economic industrial parks as “cooperation platforms.”

At sea, the Initiative will focus on jointly building smooth, secure and efficient transport routes connecting major sea ports along the “Belt and Road” including modern upgraded super port construction that will link present China ports at Haikou and Fujian with Kuala Lumpur’s port in Malaysia at the Malacca Strait passage, Calcutta in India, Nairobi in Kenya and via the Suez Canal to Athens and beyond. Crucial is that land and sea parts of OBOR are seen as one whole circulatory system or flow of trade.

The OBOR Initiative will link key Eurasian ports with interior rail and pipeline infrastructure in a way not before seen

To date China has signed memoranda of understanding with 56 countries and regional organizations regarding OBOR. Since his initial proposal in 2013, President Xi Jinping has personally visited 37 countries to discuss implementation of OBOR. China Railway Group and China Communications Construction Company have signed contracts for key routes and ports in 26 countries.

Power plants, electricity transmission facilities and oil and gas pipelines, covering 19 countries along the “Belt and Road” in some 40 energy projects have begun. China Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile are speeding up cross-border transmission projects in countries along the “Belt and Road” to expand international telecommunication infrastructure.

Already, taking the full sea and land routes of OBOR, some $3 trillion of China trade since June 2013 has flowed over the route, more than a quarter of China’s total trade volume.

To date China has also invested more than $51 billion in the countries along the present OBOR route. The new land rail routes will greatly reduce transportation costs across Eurasia, enable formerly isolated regions to connect efficiently to sea and land markets and ignite tremendous new economic growth across Eurasia.

The effects of the OBOR are already beginning to appear. Earlier this year an Iranian container ship arrived at Qinzhou Port in China with 978 containers from several countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road opening the first shipping route linking the Middle East and the Beibu Gulf or Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnamese.

In February 2016 a container train with Chinese goods took only 14 days to complete the 5,900 mile (9,500km) journey from China’s eastern Zhejiang province through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

That was 30 days shorter than the sea voyage from Shanghai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, according to the head of the Iranian railway company. China and Iran, now formally part of the OBOR, have targeted bilateral trade, none in US dollars by the way, to exceed $600 billion in the coming decade.

China is presently in negotiations with 28 countries China is in talks with 28 countries including Russia, on high-speed rail projects, China’s train maker, China CNR reports.

It includes a major joint China-Russia $15 billion high-speed Kazan to Moscow line. The 770 kilometers of track between Moscow and Russia’s Tatarstan capital, Kazan, will cut time for the journey from 12 hours now to just 3.5 hours. China has agreed to invest $6 billion in the project which would become a part of a $100 billion high-speed railway between Moscow and Beijing.

Notably, for the new high-speed track being laid, China is developing a new generation of trains capable of reaching speeds of 400 kilometers per hour. And the new trains will solve the costly rail gauge switching problem between China rails and Russian.

Trains in Russia run on a 1520mm track, compared to the narrower 1435mm track used in Europe and China. Jia Limin, the head of China’s high-speed rail innovation program told China Daily that, “The train… will have wheels that can be adjusted to fit various gauges on other countries’ tracks, compared with trains now that need to have their wheels changed before entering foreign systems.”

Given its strategy of building thousands of kilometers of high-speed railways and developing its domestic Chinese rail sock manufacture as well as other rail technology, China today is the world’s leading producer of rail technology.

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Why the New Silk Roads Terrify Washington

By Pepe Escobar

Global Research, October 12, 2016

RT News 7 October 2016

The original source of this article is RT News

Almost six years ago, President Putin proposed to Germany ‘the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’

This idea represented an immense trade emporium uniting Russia and the EU, or, in Putin’s words, “a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of dollars.”

In a nutshell: Eurasia integration.

Washington panicked. The record shows how Putin’s vision – although extremely seductive to German industrialists – was eventually derailed by Washington’s controlled demolition of Ukraine.

Three years ago, in Kazakhstan and then Indonesia, President Xi Jinping expanded on Putin’s vision, proposing One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a.k.a. the New Silk Roads, enhancing the geoeconomic integration of Asia-Pacific via a vast network of highways, high-speed rail, pipelines, ports and fiber-optic cables.

In a nutshell: an even more ambitious version of Eurasia integration, benefiting two-thirds of the world population, economy and trade. The difference is that it now comes with immense financial muscle backing it up, via a Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), and an all-out commercial offensive all across Eurasia, and the official entry of the yuan in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights; that is, the christening of the yuan as a key currency worth holding by every single emerging market central bank.

At the recent G20 in Huangzhou, President Xi clearly demonstrated how OBOR is absolutely central to the Chinese vision of how globalization should proceed. Beijing is betting that the overwhelming majority of nations across Eurasia would rather invest in, and profit from, a “win-win” economic development project than be bogged down in a lose-lose strategic game between the US and China.

And that, for the Empire of Chaos, is absolute anathema. How to possibly accept that China is winning the 21st century / New Great Game in Eurasia by building the New Silk Roads?

And don’t forget the Silk Road in Syria

Few in the West have noticed, as reported by RT, that the G20 was preceded by an Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. Essentially, that was yet another de facto celebration of Eurasia integration, featuring Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.

And that integration plank will soon merge with the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union – which in itself is a sort of Russian New Silk Road.

All these roads lead to total connectivity. Take for instance cargo trains that are now regularly linking Guangzhou, the key hub in southeast China, to the logistics center in Vorsino industrial park near Kaluga. The trip now takes just two weeks – saving no less than a full month if compared with shipping, and around 80 percent of the cost if compared with air cargo.

That’s yet another New Silk Road-style connection between China and Europe via Russia. Still another, vastly more ambitious, will be the high-speed rail expansion of the Transiberian; the Siberian Silk Road.

Then take the closer integration of China and Kazakhstan – which is also a member of the EEU. The duty-free Trans-Eurasia railway is already in effect, from Chongqing in Sichuan across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland all the way to Duisburg in Germany. Beijing and Astana are developing a joint free trade zone at Horgos. And in parallel, a $135 million China-Mongolia Cross-Border Economic Cooperation Zone started to be built last month.

Kazakhstan is even flirting with the ambitious idea of a Eurasian Canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea and then further on to the Mediterranean. Sooner or later Chinese construction companies will come up with a feasibility study.

A virtually invisible Washington agenda in Syria – inbuilt in the Pentagon obsession to not allow any ceasefire to work, or to prevent the fall of its “moderate rebels” in Aleppo – is to break up yet another New Silk Road hub. China has been commercially connected to Syria since the original Silk Road, which snaked through Palmyra and Damascus. Before the Syrian “Arab Spring”, Syrian businessmen were a vital presence in Yiwu, south of Shanghai, the largest wholesale center for small-sized consumer goods in the world, where they would go to buy all sorts of products in bulk to resell in the Levant.

The “American lake”

Neocon/neoliberalcon Washington is totally paralyzed in terms of formulating a response – or at least a counter-proposal – to Eurasia integration. A few solid IQs at least may understand that China’s “threat” to the US is all about economic might. Take Washington’s deep hostility towards the China-driven AIIB (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank). Yet no amount of hardcore US lobbying prevented allies such as Germany, Britain, Australia and South Korea from joining in.

Then we had the mad dash to approve TPP – the China-excluding, NATO-on-trade arm of the pivot to Asia that was meant to be the cherry of the mostly flat Obama global economic policy cake. Yet the TPP as it stands is practically dead.

What the current geopolitical juncture spells out is the US Navy willing to go no holds barred to stop China from strategically dominating the Pacific, while TPP is deployed as a weapon to stop China dominating Asia-Pacific economically.

With the pivot to Asia configured as a tool to “deter Chinese aggression”, exceptionalists have graphically demonstrated how they are incapable of admitting the whole game is about post-ideological supply chain geopolitics. The US does not need to contain China; what it needs, badly, is key industrial, financial, commercial connection to crucial nodes across Asia to (re)build its economy.

Those were the days, in March 1949, when MacArthur could gloat, “the Pacific is now an Anglo-Saxon lake”. Even after the end of the Cold War the Pacific was a de facto American lake; the US violated Chinese naval and aerial space at will.

Now instead we have the US Army War College and the whole Think Tankland losing sleep over sophisticated Chinese missiles capable of denying US Navy access to the South China Sea. An American lake? No more.

The heart of the matter is that China has made an outstanding bet on infrastructure building – which translates into first-class connectivity to everyone – as the real global 21st century commons, way more important than “security”. After all a large part of global infrastructure still needs to be built. While China turbo-charges its role as the top global infrastructure exporter – from high-speed rail to low-cost telecom – the “indispensable” nation is stuck with a “pivoting”, perplexed, bloated military obsessed with containment.

Divide and rule those “hostile” rivals

Well, things haven’t changed much since Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski dreaming in the late 1990s of a Chinese fragmentation from within, all the way to Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy, which is no more than futile rhetorical nostalgia about containing Russia, China and Iran.

Thus the basket of attached myths such as “freedom of navigation” – Washington’s euphemism for perennially controlling the sea lanes that constitute China’s supply chain – as well as an apotheosis of “China aggression” incessantly merging with “Russia aggression”;after all, the Eurasia integration-driven Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership must be severed at all costs.

Why? Because US global hegemony must always be perceived as an irremovable force of nature, like death and taxes (Apple in Ireland excluded).

Twenty-four years after the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide, the same mindset prevails; “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and southwest Asia”.

Oops. Now even Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski is terrified. How to contain these bloody silky roads with Pentagon “existential threats” China and Russia right at the heart of the action? Divide and Rule – what else?

For a confused Brzezinski, the US should

“fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.”

Have a pleasant nightmare.

The original source of this article is RT News

Silk Road of 21 st century: “One belt, one road”

By Zivadin Jovanovic, Chairman of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals

Beginning of March I have returned from China where I participated in the International Silk Road Think Tank conference, held in the Chinese Municipality of Shenzhen.
The Belt and Road Initiative refers to the proposal by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. There were 80 think tank participants from about 50 countries of Europe, Asia, Middle East and South America. High representatives of the government agencies from a number of countries, such as high ranking diplomats were also present (from Israel, Iran, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan). Among prominent politicians who participated were Alfred Gusenbauer, former Chancellor of Austria, Roza Otunbayeva, former President of Kyrgyzstan, and others.
Hosts and organizers were the Chinese Center for Contemporary World Studies (CCCWS), the Government of the Municipality of Shenzhen and the Fudan University of Shanghai. The International Think Tank Association of the New Silk Road was established and the Shenzhen Declaration were launched.
Foreign guests also visited Beijing, Chongqing and the district of Dazu, Sichuan Province. In Shenzhen (seat of mobile telephone production, 13 millions of inhabitants, next to Hong Kong) a welcome to the foreign participants was accorded by top local Government leaders and high politicians and scientists from Beijing.
Chongqing, with 33 million inhabitants on the Yangtze River, I learned, is the largest city in China, producing 3 million cars and 55 million laptop computers yearly. It plays one of the key roles in connecting Central China regions eastward to the Pacific and South East Asia and westward to Central Asia, the Volgograd region in Russia and Central Europe.
This particular connectivity Chongqing –Volgograd region was promoted by presidents of China and Russia – Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
The Silk Road is a multidimensional global project and aims at modernizing and expanding fiscal connectivity between China, Asia, Africa and the whole of Europe, economic development of the vast belt along the New Silk Road but at the same time, reinforcing cultural cooperation, understanding and mutual trust among nations and civilizations. It presupposes construction and modernisation of modern roads, railways, air connections, energy, food and industry production, modernisation of Sea transport, facilities and communication, in general. It requires investment of about 900 billion US dollars from chinese sources. EU is expected to provide additional 315 billion of US dollars in order to be able to fully benefit from the Initiative. So far, according to available information, the EU could secure only 60 billion approaching China for the rest. The US seem to be unwilling so far to join, or support the Chinese New Silk Road Initiative. The US has not joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in spite of the fact that their closest European allies, including Great Britain, have joined this Bank which already attracted about 60 member countries. Instead, US seem trying to get together all Asian and Pacific Ocean countries which supposedly have any reservation, or issue in dispute, towards China, to form an alternative integration counterbalancing if not obstructing Chinese Initiative. Not
being pleased with EU joining the Chinese Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank. Washington apparently steps up pleasures on Brussels to approve TTIP and let it coming into force, as possible. Kind of “dead race”, for some countries economic for the others geopolitical one, is going on not only among adversaries, but among some traditional allies, too.

Apart from the EU which has primarily economic interests to join the Initiative, the Group “China plus 16” has been established three years ago to cater for the interests of Central and South East European countries within the Initiative. For various infrastructural projects of this particular Group, for the time being, China has provided 10 billion US dol-lars. Serbia has been promised 1.5 billion which makes her a rather high ranking partner. Part of that sum has already been engaged in construction of two very important bridges – one over Danube and the other over Sava river, with the rest reserved for modernization of the Belgrade-Budapest railway. It is only the beginning of modernisation of the European corridor No. 10, connecting the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki in Greece with Central and Northern Europe.

China is also engaged in the construction of the Belgrade-Bar Highway (Montenegro, Adriatic), the thermoelectric project Obrenovac II, while negotiations are under way about the construction of a free zone Industrial Park, the first of that kind in this part of Europe. In all Serb-Chinese joint projects special consideration is given to compliance with the highest EU standards of environmental protection. Some participants in the discussion at the Shenzhen Conference have underlined the importance of connecting “Three Seas” – Adriatic, Black and Baltic. In order to optimize connectivity the Danube River water way
should be improved and modernized. The Initiative of the New Silk Road (“Belt and Road”) is only four years old. Yet, it has already embraced 75 Free zones and Industrial parks in 35 countries along the Belt. They employed about 950,000 persons and provided the tax revenue of over 100 billion of US dollars to the participating countries. New highways, railways, ports and bridges – in addition. Isn’t that a promising start of the New Silk
Road Initiative, notwithstanding hardships in the global world economy?