Belt and Road Initiative opportunity for China-EU cooperation

BRUSSELS - As China is strengthening industrial capacity cooperation worldwide, European experts thought that the Belt and Road Initiative will bring opportunity for China-EU investment and industrial capacity cooperation.

Slawomir Majman, President of the Polish Information and Foreign Investment Agency, said recently that the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative meet the development goals of Polish government.

In the "2020 National Development Strategy" document, Poland designated its main development goals, including the construction of roads, railways, airports, and others, aimed at creating modern infrastructure and contributing to the country's sustainable development.

All of those goals would be closely related to the recent initiatives of China, therefore Polish diplomats, politicians and experts on China paid close attention to the recent strategic projects of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Majman said that in the view of these strategic policies, Poland hoped for more Chinese investments in the fields of food, telecommunications, machine building, energy, information technology and research.

The cooperation between Poland and China has been constantly growing in recent year. Nowadays, a direct railway connection between Lodz in Poland and Chengdu in China's Sichuan province was already in use. Since 2012, the Chinese company Sinohydro had been carrying out the expansion of channels in Wroclaw, as a major part of the Odra river flood protection system.

Alice Ekman, a scholar with the French Institute of International relations, said that China now had reinforced confidence in its own economic weight and its own initiatives. The Belt and Road Initiative had been received positively by a number of different countries. Moreover, China had already had a lot of experience in building infrastructure at a fast pace and reasonable cost, development in Africa.

"As a new economic powerhouse, China brings a number of advantages to productivity, technology, funding, experience and development. It can then use this experience and create cooperative opportunities and market advantages for the region," said Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for EU Studies at Renmin University of China.