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Successful Launching of the BRIX at Belt & Road Business Forum in Stockholm

First Silk Road cargo shipment from Sweden celebrated

“If you want to get rich, build a road first!” With this old Chinese proverb the moderator Hussein Askary opened the 2nd China-Sweden Business Forum, which was hosted by China-Sweden Business Council (CSBC) and the new association called the Belt & Road Executive Group in Sweden (BRIX) at the Grand Hotel Winter Garden in Stockholm on September 28, 2018. This year’s main theme of the Forum was the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). One hundred members and guests took part in the event.

AmbassadorIn his opening address, H.E. The Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China, Gui Congyou, received a spontaneous applause when he brought the news to the audience that the first New Silk Road cargo shipment from Sweden to China had been sent off the week before. A train with containers left the community Insjön in the county Dalarna for the long route via Gothenburg and Hamburg to Ganzhou International Port bringing high-quality wood for a furniture producer in the Jiangxi province in Southern China.

The authorities and media in Sweden have been oblivious to the BRI so far. But this Forum provided the insights necessary to change that attitude. The association BRIX that co-hosted the event was launched at the Forum to promote an open dialogue and greater awareness of the BRI and its benefits for Sweden in particular, and the world community in general.

One key aspect of the BRI is that it is not only about links to China, but an initiative to promote global connectivity. All nations of the world are invited to participate on their own terms in the BRI. Stephen Brawer, BRIX vice Chairman, in his presentation, pointed to a world map where all continents will be connected, in the future even with links reaching out to the Americas and Australia. He pointed to the September 3-4 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing where 53 African nations linked up with BRI to fulfill the African Union’s Agenda 2063 for a continent wide modern infrastructure network and eliminating poverty in the continent.

“to foster a new type of international relations” and “forge partnerships of dialogue with no confrontation and of friendship rather than alliance.”

The BRI should not be seen only as a “practical” transport system for trade, a U.K. strategy and PR senior adviser for Sino-European public relations, underlined that the BRI, since its launching by President Xi Jinping in 2013, also has a philosophical dimension of creating harmony, “to foster a new type of international relations”, and “forge partnerships of dialogue with no confrontation and of friendship rather than alliance”. She advised Sweden to establish institutions capable of developing long term BRI cooperation with China, just as the UK had done with an office for the BRI/related Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a regional cooperation mechanism called Northern Powerhouse, the all parliamentary China-UK group, and the government’s Permanent Envoy to the BRI.

DSC_4887The typical misunderstandings of the BRI in Swedish business circles were dissected by Ali Farmandeh, chairman of the CSBC. The BRI is much more than Chinese production of Swedish goods. Furthermore, he stressed, “the New Silk Road is also not something far away, as many in the northern corner of Europe think. Among the 70 nations that have joined the BRI, there are also neighbors in Europe, who are already building their parts of the world connectivity network, projects where Swedish businesses can take part immediately.”

Working with China is sometimes challenging to the old world due to cultural differences, as Ying Wu, a former Student of Royal Technical School (KTH) in Stockholm and now CEO of SinceUs, explained in the final presentation at the Forum. Turning many Swedish business habits upside down, she brought many insightful and humorous examples of problems she has met in assisting Swedish clients to enter and expand in the Chinese market of 437 million e-commerce shoppers. She presented the case study of a Swedish brand Airnum, which she had helped bring from unknown to a bestselling brand in just one year.

These opportunities for small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) are important to make well known as best practices for further understanding in Sweden of the importance of the BRI and the opportunities for innovative businesses it opens up in so many countries worldwide.

The Swedish Wood products have a long tradition of being in the forefront of reaching out to new markets, since the industry was established in a big way as a pure export industry in the second half of the 19th century. A Swedish sawmill in Dalarna becoming a first explorer of the New Silk Road routes through Eurasia is very good news for the whole Swedish industry that is curious about the tremendous growth of new markets, cities and new industrial parks stimulated by the BRI.

Further information:

www.brixsweden.com

info@brixsweden.com


Belt and Road Initiative To Be Focus of Arab-China Meeting

July 8 -A call for stronger Arab participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative is expected to be the central result of the July 10 meeting in Beijing of the eighth ministerial conference of the Chinese-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), according to a feature by China’s Foreign Minister and State Councillor Wang Yi posted in Gulf News. Chinese President Xi Jinping will address the opening ceremony at the Great Hall of the People; the CASCF will be attended by host Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and by the foreign ministers and other ministers representing the 21 Arab countries, as well as the secretary-general of the Arab League, and Kuwait Emir Shaikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, he wrote.

“The inception of the CASCF in 2004 has further upgraded China-Arab relations, by adding a new driver in addition to the bilateral channels, and has thus accelerated the growth of China-Arab cooperation across the board,” Wang wrote.

According to China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Chen Xiaodong, Xi’s speech will highlight his country’s desire to develop stronger relations with Arab states, and it will inject new impetus into these relations, improve prospects of cooperation between the two sides, and bring new hopes to the regional peace.


Excellent Coverage of Schiller Conference by GBTimes

The Finnish-based private pro-China media outlet GBTimes ran excellent coverage of both days of the Schiller Institute conference in Bad Soden, Germany June 30 & July 1, 2018. Under the title “China’s Belt and Road Initiative Has Found a New Friend in the Schiller Institute,” Rosalie Falla reported on several aspects of the opening speech by Helga and the speech by Dr. Xu Jian of the China Institute of International Studies. The following day Falla published, “China’s deal with Italian firms will rescue Lake Chad,” summarizing the details of the great Transaqua project, a continental water project championed by the Schiller Institute and featured at the conference, and now under negotiation by African leaders, and Chinese and Italian firms.


Austrian Proposal for ‘European Silk Road’

July 4 —The Vienna Institute of International Comparative Economics (WIIW) has released a proposal for a “European Silk Road” with investments ranging up to €1 trillion over a 10-year period, focussed on two main corridors. The WIIW proposal is addressed in particular to the Austrian government, for an initiative among the EU partner countries, to be launched during Austria’s half-year rotating EU presidency, which began on July 1.

The WIIW proposals delineate the two corridors. One is Between Lyon and Moscow, extended to Barcelona and Lisbon in the west, and to Nishny Novgorod, Samara and Uralsk in the east. The second corridor runs from Milan to Zurich, Vienna, and Budapest, Bucharest, and Constanta, extended eastward to Novorossyisk and Volgograd, with another branch running to Poti, Tbilisi, and Baku. This can, the survey says, create up to 7 million new jobs, in projects of building bridges, railroads, highways, ports, and other infrastructure.

Explaining the survey, WIIW board member Dionys Lehner said that if Europe had plenty of money to stabilize the volatile banking sector after 2008, money should not be held back where infrastructure projects of this importance are concerned. Particularly the Russian aspect of it is of immediate interest for Austria: More than €300 million of new exports for the Austrian economy annually could be expected to result from such a program.


China Will Integrate Belt and Road with African Development Plans

Sept. 4, 2018  — The second day of the FOCAC Summit in Beijing consisted of a round-table chaired jointly by  President Xi Jinping and President Cyril Ramaphosa, and a series of side forums dealing with individual issues. Speaking at the concluding press conference of the summit, President Xi Jinping underlined the motif: “We will synergize China’s Belt and Road Initiative with African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the national development strategies of African countries.”

Xi said, “Together we will better uphold the common interests of China and Africa, boost the strength of developing countries, and make the world a more balanced and better place for everyone to live in.”

Xi also had words of wisdom for other “international partners” of Africa. “We hope that Africa’s international cooperation partners could learn from each other, leverage their respective strength, build synergy, and jointly contribute to peace and development in Africa,” Xi said. He thanked President Ramaphosa for his close cooperation over the last few months in preparing for the summit, and welcomed President Macky Sall of Senegal as the new African co-chair of FOCAC. President Ramaphosa reiterated his strong support for the BRI: “…[t]he China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative provides the African continent with great opportunities. African countries all collectively accept and praise the initiative, hailing it a best way to address Africa’s challenges.” He pointed out that China and African countries agreed to work more closely together and share technologies and achievements, and listed a series of projects, including the China-Africa cooperation center for ocean science and blue economy, the China-Africa research center for the development of green agriculture, the China-Africa energy technological cooperation center, and the China-Africa geo-science cooperation center.

President Sall, in turn, expressed that he is “happy” over being able to co-chair FOCAC, and said he saw “great prospects” in coming years with more engagements with the private sector. “We will push our relationship to a higher level,” he said, calling the present period of China-Africa relations, a “golden age.”


Indian Scholar: The Belt and Road Came from Lyndon and Helga LaRouche

Aug. 28 -Mahmud Ali, an Indian scholar currently at the Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, posted an article on LinkedIn titled “America’s Foundational Contributions to China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI)” on Aug. 27. He ridicules the “disdain” from Western officials and media towards the Belt and Road Initiative, and stating that the slanders are “repeated {ad nauseam},” especially in the U.S. But, he continues, the concept “originated in America, with U.S. visionaries envisaging, promoting and advancing the cause of a united Euro-Asian economic space, as early as the late 1980s, before politicians and their assorted advisors had begun considering the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the end of the Cold War. It was that American intellectual spark, nurtured by a few farsighted men and women, which illuminated the new world of possibilities. Without it, and direct intervention by governments and multilateral agencies based in America and its allies, there would probably be no BRI today.”

Then, under the subhead “American Prophets Imagine a New Silk Road,” he writes that despite the geopolitical thinking of most people in the West, based on the concepts of Halford Mackinder, “Western thinkers operating outside state-funded national security establishments envisioned a non-competitive, indeed collaborative, vision of the future. One of them, the U.S. politician and co-founder, with his wife Helga LaRouche, of the Washington-based Schiller Institute, Lyndon LaRouche, promoted such a vision, with some success in influencing segments of trans-Atlantic opinion. In October 1988, LaRouche briefed the media in West Berlin on ‘U.S. Policy Toward the Reunification of Germany,’ prophesying the collapse of COMECON economies, and urging food-support to Poland so that a majority of Germans on both sides desired reunification. In December, he assigned a group of Schiller Institute specialists to examine prospects for establishing a Paris-Berlin-Vienna productive triangle. In January 1990, Schiller Institute published LaRouche’s book on a proposed 320,000 sq.km. European economic area comprising a population of 92 million concentrated in 10 large industrial areas, from which he envisaged infrastructural corridors, linked with high-speed railways, radiating in all directions, providing a basis for upgrading living standards across Eurasia.”

Ali goes on to describe Schiller Institute conferences and {EIR} articles between 1991 and 1996 (noting that LaRouche was then in prison), when Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented her speech at the May 7-9, 1996 “Symposium on Economic Development along the New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge” in Beijing on May 8, 1996, titled “Building the Silk Road Land-Bridge: The Basis for Mutual Security Interests of Asia and Europe.”

Then, he writes: “In January 1997, Lyndon LaRouche addressed a Washington conference, urging the Clinton Administration to sponsor a New Bretton Woods system, reorganizing the world economy to prevent disruptive boom-bust cycles, and recognize the global merit of the Eurasian Land-Bridge program. Reinforcing and explaining her husband’s persistent thematic refrain, Helga LaRouche published a commentary titled, `Eurasian Land-Bridge: A New Era for Mankind,’ which was widely circulated across the Atlantic by the Schiller Foundation [sic].” He adds that Helga LaRouche addressed a second conference in Beijing in November 1997. “By then,” he continues, “railway connectivity between coastal China, Central Asia and Russia was a reality; Europe beckoned.”

He next reports on a conference in India organized by Schiller representative Ramtanu Maitra, with leading figures from Russia, China and India, where they “established a Triangular Association with the goal of promoting Indo-Russian-Chinese cooperation in forging a shared vision of Eurasia’s post-Cold War future of peace, progress and prosperity. The effort failed for a combination of distractions and difficulties: fallout from the Asian Economic Crisis, the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and America’s subsequent Global War on Terrorism, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then, the Great Recession. Nonetheless, seeds had been sown in the febrile post-Cold War intellectual hotbeds. Ideas analysed at Schiller’s many conferences and events began gelling into policy-frameworks in early 21st century.”

Ali then reviews other Western interventions into Central Asia, including a number of “bilateral investment treaties” the U.S. signed with coutries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, aimed at capturing the energy resources and breaking them away from Russia and China, and the so-called “New Silk Road Initiative” sponsored by Hillary Clinton (based on keeping Central Asia out of Russia and China influence), and the Lower Mekong Initiative, also by the U.S. State Department.

However, Ali makes a point that the U.S. initiatives were both “much more modest” than the LaRouche plans, or of Xi Jinping’s plan announced in September 2013, and that the U.S. “more candidly advertised their geopolitical drivers.” On the other hand, he concludes, “Beijing emphasized its economic, indeed geoeconomic focus.”


Uruguay to Announce Formal Entry into Belt and Road Initiative

Aug. 3, 2018-The office of Uruguayan president Tabare Vasquez has announced on its website that it will formally join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to be announced officially during the Aug. 20-27 “Uruguay Week in China” to be celebrated in the Chinese cities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Conqing.

Although the Uruguayans claim they are the “first” Ibero-American nation to officially join the BRI, both Panama and the Dominican Republic, which established diplomatic relations
with China during the past year, also claim to be the “first” in joining the BRI. Undoubtedly there will be many more “firsts”!

Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry and the Uruguay XXI trade promotion office are organizing the “Uruguay Week in China” event, and foreign minister Nin Novoa will lead the delegation
participating in it. Uruguay XXI’s director, Antonio Carambula, stressed that during the Aug. 20-27 events, “we will be presenting Uruguay as a nation of great investment opportunities
…. but also thinking of the possibilities of expanding to the rest of the region,” according to the montevideo.comwebsite.

Following the August events, Uruguay will send another large delegation to Shanghai, to attend the Nov. 5-10 China International Import Expo, hosted by the Chinese Commerce Ministry and the Shanghai municipal government. This is a huge affair, at which representatives of at least 100 countries are expected to attend. Several Ibero-American governments and companies have already committed to attending, and the Chinese continue to organize for this aggressively around the world.

(Chinese imports are in fact growing significantly faster than its exports now; a 21% annual pace in the first half of 2018, as opposed to 10% annual rate of growth in exports.) Also taking place in November in the city of Zhuhai is the China-Latin America-Caribbean Business Forum, which Uruguay hosted last year, and is another very large event including Chinese and Ibero-American businessmen and government officials. Later in November, Carambula announced, the “icing on the cake” will be Chinese president Xi Jinping’s state visit to Uruguay following the G20 meeting.


Global Silk Road Forum Will Be Held in Astana in July

April 1 -On July 3-4, 2018, Astana, Kazakhstan, will host the forum “Global Silk Road,” Director of the International Secretariat G-Global Serik Nugerbekov confirmed. “This forum is devoted to the 5th anniversary of the One Belt, One Road initiative and the 20th anniversary of Astana,” he told the round table “Kazakhstan and China in the New Epoch of Interaction” at the Kazakh Embassy in China, Kazinform reported on March 28. He said that the Global Silk Road Forum agenda will include a forum to bring together the mayors of cities along the Silk Road, for further communication and cooperation.

“We thank the scientists of the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and 30 other countries for the support. We propose to continue the trend of bringing representatives of different fields together for cooperation,” Nugerbekov said, {Global Times} reported today.

There is also a proposal that the Silk Road Science Academy created in Kazakhstan will seek to unite experts of the Silk Road countries engaged in various fields.


Schiller Institute’s Stephan Ossenkopp Interviewed by Chinese Media

March 31, 2018 – The German-language {China.org} journal interviewed “German China expert Stephan Ossenkopp” two days ago, on the question of the U.S. Import tariffs against China. He said that the continuous, successful and most of all peaceful rise of China is making those western elites nervous that do not want to give up their hegemony in international trade regulations. Punitive tariffs and investment bans will however not change this historic trend. The time of unilateral global systems is past, he said.

Stephan O

The time of unilateral global systems is past

The enormous trade deficit of the USA viz. China is the result of a paradigm change of the US economy away from investments in innovative infrastructure and production, but into speculative financial products, Ossenkopp explained. If Trump really wants to make America strong again, he should reactivate the Glass-Steagall Act, end the disastrous Wall Street speculation and revitalize his infrastructure and space program with a focus on technologically advanced industrial production.

Trump, Ossenkopp added, should utilize the chances offered by the Silk Road initiative, to bring the USA back on the right track with investments in the real economy.


The Message Which López Obrador Should Take to Trump: A World Summit of Nations Is Urgently Needed to Address the Crisis

Statement by the LaRouche Citizens’ Movement of Mexico

July 3 — The opportunity has arrived. On the eve of the upcoming July 8 meeting between the Presidents of the United States and Mexico, Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a number of international statements and developments have occurred which highlight the world importance of that meeting, in particular because of the role that Mexico will play as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, starting on Jan. 1, 2021.

At the beginning of 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed that a summit be held of the five permanent members (P-5) of the U.N. Security Council (Russia, China, United States, France and the United Kingdom) to address the grave crises which the entire planet is facing, and which require immediate joint action. These urgent crises include:

* The coronavirus pandemic;

* The collapse of the physical economy and the total bankruptcy of the Wall Street and City of London speculative financial system, a collapse worsened – but not caused – by the pandemic.

* The need to create a new international security architecture, in order to prevent a Third World War from being unleashed. The recent article by President Putin on the subject of the origins of the Second World War is an important contribution in that regard.

Such a summit must be held as soon as possible, based on the same approach that the great American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) set forth in his New Deal and Good Neighbor policies.

That is the central message which President López Obrador should communicate to his counterpart President Trump at their upcoming meeting.

Both Presidents, whose presidencies share a common origin — which is that their respective populations were fed up with the old system of looting –, also share a background of fighting to make their campaign promises a reality. But they have also been bogged down by the burden of ferocious attacks coming from a deafening campaign by the media and certain political circles to prevent them from taking any action. On the eve of their meeting, a new wave of collective hysteria has launched protests, which are being joined by congressmen and governors on both sides of our common border, demanding that the upcoming presidential meeting be cancelled.

It is not hard to imagine the fear of political and media circles tied to the current bankrupt system, at the prospect that the two presidents might reach agreements regarding the benefits that would come from joining their efforts to the call issued by the Presidents of Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping
respectively, to govern relations between nations on a new basis, such as the kind of approach taken by the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his long terms of office.

Recently, even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated on June 30 that he will orient his government along the lines of FDR’s New Deal policies. “It sounds like a New Deal, and all I can say is, that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand — a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis.”

In response to that statement, Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated:

“If, however, Boris Johnson would be serious about it [the New Deal approach], and he would immediately agree to participate in the summit called by Putin, and would insist that the New Deal in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt is being made the subject of such a P5 summit, then it could be taken seriously and would actually be a useful contribution.”

Why we emphasize Roosevelt

Russian President Putin has called for a new, global security architecture, such as in his famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, shaped around FDR’s approach: “It is well known that the field of international security goes well beyond issues of military and political stability. It involves the stability of the world economy, overcoming poverty, economic security, and the development of a dialogue among civilizations. This all-encompassing, indivisible character of security is expressed in its fundamental principle, that ‘the security of each is the security of all.’ As Franklin Roosevelt put it in the first days after the outbreak of the Second World War, ‘When peace has been broken anywhere, peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.’ These words remain topical today.”

As for Chinese President Xi Jinping, he told a Seattle business group during a visit to the U.S. in 2016: “In my younger years … I was interested in the life story and thinking of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and other American statesmen.”

President Trump has also turned directly to FDR on numerous occasions, including in his victory speech the night of the 2016 election, stating: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

President López Obrador, throughout his campaigns, has emphasized the historical importance of FDR. In mid June, he instructed Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico’s representative before the United Nations, where Mexico was elected to serve as a non-permanent member of the Securtiy Council, to promote “the fulfillment of the four fundamental freedoms proclaimed by President Roosevelt,” freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want.”

López Obrador also state that, in terms of sustainable development, “the rich nations and international financial institutions [should] support poor peoples and governments in combatting hunger, epidemics, avoiding racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia and discrimination; help with investments and regional development programs so that no one, no human being on this Earth is forced to emigrate from the place of their birth due to a lack of opportunity to work or because of violence.”

Finally, he said the Security Council must be guided by the principle of Mexico’s great President Benito Juárez, that “among individuals as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.” López Obrador said that “in no conflict shall force be used and in no case shall the hegemonic force of the powers be imposed.”

For these reasons, we issue this call for President López Obrador to be the messenger of peace and take President Trump a message of unity, so that a world summit be carried out under the guidelines set forth by Roosevelt, whether that be under the aegis of a Four Power Summit (Russia, China, the U.S. and India) as Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly proposed, or one initiated by the P-5, as Putin has called for – so long as the summit’s mission is to construct a new paradigm of world peace based on universal economic development, and that the summit be only the beginning of an international association open to all nations on the planet.

We believe that only an institutional force on such a scale as this can lead the world away from the current social and health crisis, which stems from the pandemic and the economic collapse, and orient the path of nations towards a new paradigm of general welfare for all.


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