The New Silk Road - Belt & Road Initiative -, launched by China in 2013 and which affects 139 countries today loses Australia which canceled the memorandum of intent as it is no longer considered in line with its foreign policy.
"This is another unreasonable and provocative move“, So Beijing commented through its chancellery in Australia, after the announcement by Foreign Minister Marise Payne. The mistrust, however, starts from afar, when Australia opened an investigation into the origin of Covid and China, in response, tightened relations with the imposition of trade sanctions. But Beijing also did not like the initiative launched by the country of kangaroos with the US and Japan for new projects related to infrastructure. Australia has also always condemned China for the arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong and the repression of Uighurs. Precisely on the case of the Uyghurs, among other things, in Rome in the House Foreign Affairs Commission, writes the Ansa, we are working to arrive next week to a synthesis of the 5 resolutions proposed by the parties. One could include a reference to the US, Canada and the Netherlands who have called it "genocide". And we also look to Great Britain, where tomorrow the House of Commons will discuss crimes against humanity in the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang.
"Intruding in the internal affairs of others will not get any support"he said yesterday Xi at the Boao Forum for Asia, before a sort of invocation of a new world order against the American leadership. Xi with the New Silk Road it aimed to take advantage of Washington's protectionism in the Trump era by involving Chinese companies and banks to finance and build railways, ports, highways and technological infrastructure, and create trade corridors between Asia, Europe, Africa and South America.
The only G7 country to join the New Silk Road was Italy in 2018, raising a lot of criticism from EU countries and from the US itself. A memorandum of intent "more 'than anything else symbolic, with few followers ", highlights the task force of Council on Foreign Relations, according to which the Covid crisis has exposed the limits of the Chinese approach. With the slowdown in the flow of supplies from Beijing, many countries have postponed or canceled projects, and others - especially some of the 39 BRI member states in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Kenya - have found themselves with an additional burden of "neo-colonial debt" .