Initiative offers global community a better way

The third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, for which leaders, representatives and businesspeople from around the world have gathered in Beijing to discuss the Belt and Road Initiative's shared goals of common development, integration and prosperity, comes at a sharp turning point in the world's history.

The event, held on Tuesday and Wednesday, also marks 10 years since the grand project was proposed by President Xi Jinping.

The BRI has funded infrastructure and contributed to common economic growth and people-to-people exchanges all over the world. Primarily tailored toward countries of the developing Global South, the initiative endeavours to address global inequalities in development through its projects, which create new opportunities to expand trade and more readily integrate countries for a "community of a shared future".

Although commonly associated with infrastructure, the BRI is increasingly an umbrella term that refers to many forms of cooperation, ranging from education and science to the environment.

Contrary to misleading Western media reports, the BRI is not a zero-sum game in which some countries "win" at the expense or exploitation of others. Instead, it places an onus on commonality and globalization as the primary means to achieving growth.

For example, the China-Laos Railway, which opened in late 2021, has given landlocked Laos a railway that allows it to access the Chinese market, massively expanding its exports and overcoming geographic obstacles. Or consider the new Padma Bridge in Bangladesh, which has fully connected the country by spanning its widest river. The BRI thus creates new openings for countries.

The Belt and Road Forum comes at a pivotal juncture in world history. The BRI aims for cooperation on shared economic challenges to achieve mutual gains.

While, on the other hand, another group of countries are intent on emphasizing "zero-sum" gains for themselves and see global politics not as a forum for working together, but as a battle for influence and supremacy. This has led a certain party to actively seek to roll back globalization and fracture the global economy in the name of preserving its economic, military and technological dominance.

Using the rhetoric of "de-risking "and "decoupling", the United States and the president of the European Commission have essentially argued that enhanced economic integration and coordination throughout the world is inherently bad because it purportedly weakens the long-standing privileges that certain countries have had for hundreds of years.

Globalization, after all, was built on the historical legacy of Global North countries, or colonial empires to be more exact, extracting privileges and wealth from the Global South, which it militarily and economically dominated, to enrich itself. To name just one example, the British Empire engaged in aggression against China to sell opium to enrich itself, while it also colonized India to sell tea.

Thus, colonialism has created a fundamentally unequal economic order, which has kept many countries in poverty and concentrated wealth in the hands of a few.

When the US became the leading superpower starting in 1945, it further consolidated its privileges through a financial system known as Bretton Woods, which has only served to keep non-Western countries poor.

However, the rise of China has seen the rise of a multipolar environment that has eroded the traditional dominance the US once had. This has seen the US try to roll back globalization through the aggressive application of sanctions and export controls and attempts to force supply chain shifts that undermine and disrupt global trade.

If US plans come to fruition, the status quo of wealth inequality between the Global North and Global South will be sustained, and the path of many countries to develop will be blocked.

Because of this, the BRI has become the global flag bearer of globalization throughout the world, as it is the only means whereby countries can cooperate on economic growth without falling into a spiral of ideological competition, bloc confrontation and Western-led "decoupling".

The BRI is an all-embracing program that seeks to impart China's developmental experience to better assist countries of the Global South in their economic options, sustain their sovereignty and therefore develop on terms and conditions suited to them, as opposed to Western-led political interference. The choice could not be clearer.

The BRI is therefore championing the survival of an open free trade system and ensuring that countries do not have to choose sides, or have their development subject to alliance-related politics.

The author is a British political and international relations analyst.