Recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Cambodia and Bangladesh, while also attending the BRICS Leaders Meeting in India. On many occasions, President Xi reiterated that the Belt and Road initiative should be given top priority in order to benefit China’s cooperation with neighbouring countries.

The Belt and Road initiative is bringing back memories of the Silk Road by reducing the psychological distance between China and neighbouring countries. It is helping ignite the dream of common development. In spatial terms, the Belt and Road initiative—which aims to better establish connectivity with Europe, Asia and Africa—will start from and focus on neighbouring countries. In terms of development, neighbouring countries are facing the task of poverty alleviation, as well as attempting to reach United Nations’ 2030 sustainable development goals. The Belt and Road initiative will make up for the weaknesses of these countries’ development, especially in terms of infrastructure construction.

Specifically, these surrounding countries can involve themselves in the Belt and Road initiative in the following ways:

——By promoting connectivity. Under the framework of the Pan-Asian high-speed rail proposal, China and Cambodia signed a series of agreements concerning the joint construction of airports, seaports and highways. And India hopes that the China-Pakistan economic corridor will extend to their country.

——By promoting strategic docking. The docking of China’s Belt and Road initiative with Cambodia’s Rectangular strategy, and Bangladesh’s development strategy, both promise broad prospects for the further implementation of the Belt and Road initiative.

——By promoting international production capacity and cooperation in the equipment manufacturing sector. The Belt and Road initiative will promote production capacity cooperation between China and its neighbouring countries. This will help improve living standards, solve bottleneck development problems and contribute to the alleviation of poverty.

——By jointly building economic development zones. Chittagong will help Bangladesh better integrate into the international trade system, and thus narrow the development gap between the country’s coastal and inland areas. The construction of economic development zones and industrial parks is facilitating the formation of the BCIM economic corridor.

In short, China’s surrounding countries will be the first to benefit from the Belt and Road initiative. (Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, and senior researcher with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies)