China's Belt and Road strategy might start as a way to rationalize and coordinate outbound investment projects that have amounted to more than $1 trillion. With efforts from the top leadership, it has evolved into the strategy for China's relationship with the outside world and also domestic reform and development. It is no longer just one of the three spatial strategies of China for the coming five-year plan period, but serves now to guide China's overall resurgence.

President Xi Jinping's call for learning from the past experiences of the Silk Road is important, as the Silk Road had lasted more than 2,000 years and covered most of the development of China's civilization after the first political unification and integration before the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD). It explains the material and non-material (species and spiritual) evolution of the cultural entity of China. The Chinese Silk Road represents the Chinese road to civilization, and during this historical process China had always allowed and cooperated with other economies to engage in their ways of development. It has done this without imposing ideological/religious controls and political/military domination on them for the extraction of surpluses from their societies. The reason why the Silk Road could last for millennia is because it promotes peace and development and the exchange and cooperation of civilizations. It had not been about empire building. Its end in the early 20th century was a result of imperialism and colonialization by the West that shattered China and the countries along the Silk Road.

China's economic miracles since 1978 have been a result of China's quest for its own development path and model, and the success it has achieved in this regard. The resurgence of a unified and independent China paves the way for the revival of the Silk Road, and the two will be mutually reinforcing.

The history of the Silk Road shows that both politics (international relations) and finance are essential to turning the Silk Road spirit into reality. China now offers more politics than finance, as finance is not just about funding investment projects but more the use of an international currency to facilitate and reduce risks in trade, investment and all other forms of exchanges and development. As China is facing hostility from the last global hegemon, the United States, and as the Silk Road is to revive a multi-polar world very much in opposition to and at the expense of the US hegemony, there are bound to be conflicts and confrontations between the US on one side and China plus the Silk Road development on the other. Hong Kong as the most globalized city of China should be in a position to play an important role to assist the mainland and development of the Silk Road.

First, Hong Kong could follow the example of London since 1958 to serve as the finance and knowledge capital of the developing world - this time, the Silk Road economies. This would not be a simple extension of the existing financial capital functions of city. As the Silk Road countries are beyond the Anglo-Saxon world Hong Kong has been serving in the past decades, relearning and re-engineering existing institutions and practices as well as socio-economic ties are crucial for it to acquire a new role and new clientele.

Second, Hong Kong has to become more global, more inclusive and more tolerant to different languages, cultures and civilizations. In the past, this had been the institutional and cultural advantages of the SAR as a free port in Asia and in the linkages between the mainland and the outside world and between the East and West. In recent years it seems this tradition has been declining. Thus it will be essential to supplement the knowledge and institutional relearning and reorganization with a return to open-mindedness at social and cultural levels.

Third, Hong Kong has to accept more people, especially those from the Belt and Road countries and regions. This would directly contribute to the reorientation and open-mindedness of the city as a whole. As a free city, Hong Kong has benefited from and should be benefiting more from the presence of a great diversity of peoples with diverse backgrounds and orientation as well as socio-economic ties with other societies and countries. Hong Kong's past economic transformations had relied upon the influx of mainland people from different sub-cultural and local tradition background, in particular those from the Shanghai, Fujian, Chaozhou and Guangzhou areas. There have also been large communities of non-Chinese, British, Canadian, Australian, European (in particular French and Italian), Japanese and South Asians. Hong Kong has been a cosmopolitan society, and this has served as the foundation of globalized professional services that have been supporting the global financial-center functions of the city, putting it only behind London and New York.

Fourth, Hong Kong has to develop knowledge-intensive research and education institutions to support its many global functions, which could be used for leverage for the agglomeration and expansion of the knowledge-intensive services to be located here from the mainland and the Belt and Road countries.

The author is head of China Business Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

(HK Edition 05/18/2016 page1)