Hear THE Voices...
Voices of the Belt & Road tells the stories of people that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It demystifies the initiative by enabling you to listen to the voices of experts and policy-makers, but also the very people affected by the initiative day in and day out.
It has become fashionable to conceptualize the BRI through large numbers. But we hear very little of the people and stories behind the initiative. BRI needs stories, it needs faces and it needs voices. Voices of the Belt and Road is your chance to hear them.
In this podcast, Martin Jacques, a world-renowned best selling author, Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing puts forward his views on how the BRI will impact the world and enhance China’s global hegemony. It is a rare preview into some of the topics he will be covering in his next book!
Read MoreIn this podcast, Sebastian Murdoch-Gibson, a research fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada discusses the ‘Polar Silk Road’ and its potential consequences for the Arctic and Nordic countries. He also talks about his travels, where he met a wide variety of actors who are involved with proposed Belt and Road projects including a former tech entrepreneur and creator of Angry Birds who wants to link Helsinki and Tallinn via a undersea tunnel.
Read MoreIn this podcast, Harriet Kariuki, a young analyst from Kenya who works at an investment firm in the region talks about China-Africa relations in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. This includes topics such as Chinese investments in the Horn of Africa, the current debt build-up, the African startup scene, as well as integration amongst Chinese and Africans.
Read MoreIn this podcast, Chris Devonshire-Ellis, Chairman and Founder of Dezan Shira and Associates, discusses how foreign firms can benefit from Chinese built Belt and Road infrastructure. He stresses that the bigger opportunity for foreign firms is to actually understand the infrastructure build up and the knock-on opportunities this new infrastructure is going to create. One examples is the Chinese built Southern Expressway in Sri Lanka. This is a road which leads from Colombo airport and heads southwards. That reduced the journey time from 5-6 hours to 2.5 hours. That’s had a huge impact on the tourism industry, and some of the big hotel chains entered as a result.
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