Page 6 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.76, # 1, 2019, pp. 4-19

continues therefore what o ther leader generations have prepared for, promoting
continuity within a constant process of reforms and innovation (Xi, 2017).
Significantly, the Chinese media and scholars are using the term of Belt and Road
Initiatives instead of Belt and Road strategy in all occasions. It reflects the problem
that China is facing strong suspicion from related countries. A strategy has certain
goals to be achieved and clear plans and approaches towards the goals; while an
initiative in this case could be a direction of development for groups of countries.
China could act as the major contributor of rules and mechanisms and would be less
likely to take the burdens of the BRI. China avoids mentioning any detailed and
ultimate goals of BRI. However, the lack of information could be interpreted as a
lack of transparency of China and leads to stronger doubts on China’s intentions in
Europe.

Europe is the destination of the ancient Silk Road as well as the BRI. Considering
the distance, transportation and logistics could be a major problem. On the contrary,
to deal with the problem, China provides the solutions on infrastructure construction
as the support of BRI including the China Railway Express to Europe as well as
maritime and air transportation such as Luxemburg-Zhengzhou and Xian-
Amsterdam. By these constructions, China could promote further economic
cooperation not only at the terminal which is Europe but also the countries along the
belt and road through the Eurasian Continent Economic Corridor (Liu & Chen,
2017).

On the EU side, an important year was 2010, when the EU launched 2020 strategy to
enhance a win-win cooperation. If we look at the establishment of the European
“Partnership Instruments” to promote international cooperation, we can clearly see
many areas of mutual interest, which correspond to common priorities in both the
EU and China (research, academy, innovation, etc. -European Commission, 2017).
However, if these strategies cover many fields, from global challenges to business,
from diplomacy to academic development and cooperation, and the relations with
China have strongly improved – as a matter of figures – there are still, as said, many
criticalities to be addressed. The EU have been facing financial, migration, terrorist
crises, showing many limits in terms of poor internal governance and subordination
to the US strategies. Consequently, Chinese public opinion and authorities are
strongly questioning the reliability of the EU and their general confidence in the
hypothetical alternative role played by Europe (Chang and Pieke, 2017). Here we
can find a reason of the main Chinese method to approach Europe, which is focused
prevalently on bilateral agreements with single countries.

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