The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (the Belt and Road) were proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visits to Central Asia and Southeast Asia, respectively, in September and October of 2013. A clear sign of the political significance of the Belt and Road is that it was included in the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Some Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reform, adopted on November 12, 2013. The last paragraph of Article 26, Section VII of the Decision reads:
Interestingly, few Chinese scholars and pundits initially seemed interested in Xi’s proposal. One indication of lukewarm domestic reaction to this new foreign policy initiative is that a search of “the Belt and Road” in article titles in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure—the world’s largest digital collection of Chinese language academic resources—generates merely 169 entries in 2014. The same search, however, produces an astonishing 2,735 entries for 2015 (as of December 13).
Many Chinese and foreign observers view the Belt and Road as a grand Chinese strategy to extend its economic and geopolitical influence in the Eurasian continent and beyond. But Beijing has explicitly refused to call it a strategy. In “Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road” (Vision and Actions for short), a document jointly issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Commerce at the Boao Forum on March 28, 2015, the Belt and Road is described as , translated into English as “initiative.”
Then on September 23, the three ministries jointly issued a statement on standardizing the English translation of the Belt and Road. The statement specifically emphasizes that initiative should be in the singular instead of the plural form, and that the words strategy, project, program, or agenda should not be used.
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