The Sino-Turkish strategic partnership amid new initiatives

REUTERS photo

Two recent initiatives will likely galvanize the "Middle Kingdom" - already the world's most populous country, second largest economy, number-one trading nation, and biggest energy consumer - into further consolidating its global ambitions. 

One is President Xi Jinping's brainchild - a web of new secure energy, trading, transport, communications land and maritime corridors and investment schemes reaching  out to Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East/Gulf and Africa. They include the Silk Road Economic Belt, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor and other "March West" initiatives, all requiring hundreds of billions of dollars infrastructure investment. 

The ancient Silk Road, famously traveled by Italian explorer Marco Polo, connected China and India with Persia, Arabia, East Africa, Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. Today, China has an ambitious vision to revive it by creating a 21st-century corridor from Shanghai in the east of China, stretching 8,000 miles across China, Mongolia, Central Asia and Turkey, all the way to Berlin. 

We are talking about roads and motorways, railways, power lines, energy distribution networks and fiber-optic cable lines. Cities and ports en route would also be redeveloped. But there's more - a 'Maritime Silk Road' - linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean via the China Seas and across the Indian Ocean.

To give you an idea of the scale of this - it would cover some 4.4 billion people (remember that the global population is 7 billion) and one-third of the earth's circumference. The economic output of the region covered is $21 trillion.

China's connections with these regions have expanded considerably in the past decade. Having...

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