Discussion | European Perspectives on the New Silk Roads – Re-engaging China?

The monumental connectivity project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or New Silk Road, initiated by Xi Jinping almost a decade ago, has gained considerable attention both in the developed world and the Global South. However, with the US- Chinese trade war since 2017, the Corona pandemic since 2020 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we have experienced a paradigmatic shift towards economic and political competition in a global zero-sum game, with the US and the People’s Republic of China leveraging their respective geopolitical influence in a worldwide contention. Others, such as the EU, South East Asia and India come under increasing pressure to choose sides. We facilitate a discussion among Chinese and international experts to revisit the topic of European Perspectives on the BRI in light of recent developments to increase mutual understanding and reduce systemic myopia.

The Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin | LEIZ in 2020 organized a Transcultural Leadership Summit on the topic of the European Perspectives on the New Silk Roads and in 2022 a volume by Josef Wieland, Jessica G. Schwengber and Matthias Niedenführ was published with Metropolis on this topic. Now LEIZ and its new Centre for Leadership and Innovation in Asia (CLIA) organizes an event at Zeppelin University to rekindle the debate.

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