One Belt One Road

In some countries Beijing is pushing at an open door. Trade between China and the five central Asian states — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — has grown dramatically since 2000, hitting $50bn in 2013, according to the International Monetary Fund. China now wants to build the roads and pipelines needed to smooth access to the resources it needs to continue its development.

Mr Xi started to offer more details about the scheme earlier this year with an announcement of $46bn in investments and credit lines in a planned China-Pakistan economic corridor, ending at the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar. In April, Beijing announced plans to inject $62bn of its foreign exchange reserves into the three state-owned policy banks that will finance the expansion of the new Silk Road. Some projects, already on the drawing board, seem to have been co-opted into the new scheme by bureaucrats and businesspeople scrambling to peg their plans to Mr Xi’s policy.

On April 28 the commerce ministry announced that Silk Road countries account for 26 per cent of China’s foreign trade, a remarkably precise statistic. However, a request from the Financial Times for more specific details on the list of nations went unanswered.

China’s military is also eager to get its share of the political and fiscal largesse that accompanies the new Silk Road push. One former US official says he was told by senior generals in the People’s Liberation Army that the One Belt, One Road strategy would have a “security component”.

Projects in unstable areas will inevitably test China’s policy of avoiding security entanglements abroad. Pakistan has assigned 10,000 troops to protect Chinese investment projects, while in Afghanistan, US troops have so far protected a Chinese-invested copper mine.

Port construction in countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan has led some analysts to question whether China’s ultimate aim is dual-use naval logistics facilities that could be put into service controlling sea lanes, a strategy dubbed the “String of Pearls”.

in Xinjiang, the desert region that has 22 per cent of China’s domestic oil reserves and 40 per cent of its coal deposits.