Connecting thoughts

Russian author Yury Tavrovsky attends the book launch of the Chinese edition of his latest work, New Silk Road, in Beijing on May 17.[Photo provided to China Daily]

The demand for stories in different languages related to the Belt and Road Initiative has risen, Mei Jia reports.

With China hosting the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing earlier this week, the demand for stories related to the initiative has gone up, according to Chinese publishers.

Yury Tavrovsky, a professor with the Russian People's Friendship University in Moscow, says he sees the Belt and Road Initiative as an important plan for the world in this century but finds that some people, including fellow Russians, don't know much about it.

The China expert spent months from 2015 to 2016 visiting important Chinese cities along the new Silk Road, to figure out how the initiative has taken off since it was launched in 2013.

He covered 11,000 kilometers from the seaside city of Lianyungang in Jiangsu province to Alashankou and Khorgos in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

He spoke to Russian-speaking Chinese port officials in Lianyungang, where the inland and sea routes of the Silk Road meet, and found a special dock reserved for Kazakhstan, a landlocked neighboring country.

"The Belt and Road Initiative in its current stage is like a big jigsaw puzzle in some sense. But after my trips, I found that China has already placed its own pieces," he says.

He says cities in western China have "developing zones", where beneficial policies are attracting more foreign investment.