China’s Xi Doubles Down on Belt and Road as Path to New World Order
BEIJING—With one war raging in Ukraine and another unfolding in the Middle East, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is promoting his signature foreign-policy project as a force for unity, cooperation and prosperity around the globe. At a summit convened here to celebrate the Belt and Road Initiative, the picture looked more fractured.
During a keynote speech inside Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Wednesday, Xi positioned China as a leader of a new, more inclusive global order and promised that his country’s rise would benefit any that wanted to participate. “We don’t do ideological confrontation, we don’t do geopolitical rivalry and we don’t do bloc politics," he said, taking aim at unilateral sanctions, economic decoupling and other tools that Beijing accuses the U.S.
of exploiting to contain its rivals. “What has been achieved in the past 10 years demonstrates that Belt and Road cooperation is on the right side of history." Invited to speak directly after Xi, Russian leader Vladimir Putin praised what he said were the trillion-dollar infrastructure program’s efforts to build a “fairer, multipolar world and system of international relations," according to a translation by Chinese state broadcaster CGTN.
The prominence given to Putin, and the near absence of Western representation among the roughly two-dozen world leaders who attended the forum, reflects how the Belt and Road Initiative has become increasingly fractured along geopolitical lines since Xi first proposed the idea a decade ago—tensions that have been worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and most recently the attack on Israel by Hamas. Originally envisaged as a way to promote infrastructure development to better link China to Central Asia and beyond, the
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