Search results

Although there is a growing number concerning articles/papers on China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR), it is difficult to find comprehensive research regarding the economic background in spite of the OBOR initiative involving multi-dimensional considerations. Although China targets to become a soft power leader by reviving the spirit of the old Silk Road, the OBOR is a large-scale investment project, whose rate of investment (ROI) is important for sustainability. Since new infrastructure in isolated regions is likely to be used less frequently, anticipated profitability is low. In spite of this risk, China promotes the OBOR for its economic and political purposes. China will promote the OBOR in spite of the U.S. withdrawal from TPP membership, since boosting aggregate demand is of critical importance for the country. This paper analyzes the economic background of the OBOR, which establishes China’s own model of regional integration, eases unemployment, and internationalizes its currency. Finally, this paper discusses diverse risks for China in the process of implementing the OBOR.

Since One Belt One Road (OBOR) was proposed, Singaporean sides have reacted differently. Based on the case of Zaobao, the authors develop the theoretical frame including international relations, agenda setting and media framing, analyzing the construction of textual materials on OBOR and its influencing factors.

In this sense, this paper attempts to use Zaobao's texts on OBOR from 2015 to 2017 as textual materials, by using the discourse analysis method and combining the theories of international relations, agenda setting and media framing, to explore the following two relevant questions: How does the mainstream Chinese media of Singapore construct OBOR issue? What factors influence this kind of construction?

The study finds that agendas setting on OBOR are diversified in the purpose of supporting official position and meeting audiences' expectations, which are constrained by the factors such as international situations, regional strategies, national interests and domestic politics. The authors learn more details about hidden and vague thoughts on OBOR from all sides in Singapore through this discourse analysis.

In summary, the academic community has a certain foundation for the study of the cognition of the “Belt and Road” initiative. However, compared with the other countries' research on the Belt and Road cognition, the research on Singapore is insufficient. Singapore is an important hub for the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. At the same time, as a leader of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), it has a strong appeal and influence in other ASEAN countries. It has also played a pivotal role in building the “Belt and Road”. However, the “Belt and Road” initiative has been proposed and implemented for five years. The research on Singapore's cognition and reaction of the “Belt and Road” initiative is still insufficient. Therefore, an in-depth study of Singapore's cognition of the ‘Belt and Road” initiative has significant academic and applied value. This paper attempts to explore the construction of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative by Singapore's official media to make up for the shortcomings of existing research.

The growing power of China's economy with its ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative for building a new globalised world is generally believed to have an impact on global economic development and sustainability.

The current Chairman and President of the People's Republic of China Mr. Jinping Xi proposed the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative in 2013 during his official visit to Kazakhstan and Indonesia. This was a Chinese initiative to create the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) to promote a new model for international cooperation and development. In recent years, more and more countries from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa have agreed to join the initiative and have established their regional plans for economic development and sustainability.

This chapter provides a critical review of China's ‘One Belt and One Road’ initiative for creating higher growth and economic development through infrastructure connectivity, increased trade and investment. It discusses the challenges of the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative and reports on the risks associated with the development of this regional cooperation. It summarises arguments for a common approach to infrastructure development and regional cooperation by supranational institutions.

It concludes that the growing positive support for China's ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative and its development as one of the largest infrastructure and investment projects in history would bring significant benefits to the global economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically China’s determined thrust to attain a high level of technological innovation and the factors affecting moving towards a smart and sophisticated manufacturing ecosystem in conjunction with the Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR).

This research provides empirical determination of the factors affecting moving towards smart manufacturing ecosystems in China. The method is based on combining two approaches: semi-structured interview and questionnaire-based with academics, experts and managers in various Chinese industrial sectors. The results are based on the multivariate analysis of the collected data. A case study of the current manufacturing ecosystem was also analyzed, in order to understand the present state as well as the potential for China’s competitive edge in the developed OBOR countries.

The results illustrate the importance of the infrastructure dimension comprising variables related to ecosystems, industrial clusters and Internet of Things IoT and other advanced technologies. A case study of the city of Shenzhen’s transformation into a smart cluster for innovative manufacturing points out how China’s OBOR initiative for regional collaboration will further transform the regional smart clusters into an ultra-large innovation based smart ecosystem.

This research is the first to study China’ policies towards playing a prominent role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution 4IR in the context of the OBOR initiative, through empirically defining the factors affecting moving towards a knowledge-intensive smart manufacturing ecosystem where the added value is mostly innovation based.

With the continuous development of intelligent technologies, knowledge graph, the backbone of artificial intelligence, has attracted much attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its powerful capability of knowledge representation and reasoning. Besides, knowledge graph has been widely applied in different kinds of applications, such as semantic search, question answering, knowledge management, and so on. In recent years, knowledge graph techniques in China are also developing rapidly and different Chinese knowledge graphs have been built to support various applications. Under the background of “One Belt One Road (OBOR)” initiative, cooperating with the countries along OBOR on studying knowledge graph techniques and applications will greatly promote the development of artificial intelligence. At the same time, the accumulated experience of China on developing knowledge graph is also a good reference. Thus, in this chapter, the authors mainly introduce the development of Chinese knowledge graphs and their applications. The authors first describe the background of OBOR, and then introduce the concept of knowledge graph and three typical Chinese knowledge graphs, including Zhishi.me, CN-DBpedia, and XLORE. Finally, the authors demonstrate several applications of Chinese knowledge graphs.

This paper's purpose is to suggest that manufacturers strategically place soft orders for assembly materials with suppliers in Silk Road Economic Belt countries who probably doubt the realization of the soft orders placed.

First, a two-stage Stackelberg competition is constructed, taking into account the supplier's trust level in formulating the decision process in the assembly supply chain. The authors then provide a buyback contract to coordinate the supply chain, in which the manufacturer obtains enough supplies by sharing some of the perceived risks of not fully trusted suppliers. Furthermore, the authors conduct a numerical study to investigate the influence of trust under a decentralized case and a buyback contract.

The authors found that all supply chain partners in Silk Road Economic Belt countries experience potential losses due to not fully trusting certain conditions. The study also shows that, in Silk Road Economic Belt countries, operating under a buyback contract is better than being without one in terms of assembly supply chain performance.

On the one hand, the authors only consider the asymmetry of demand information without considering that of cost structure information. On the other hand, a natural extension of the paper is to integrate single-period transactions into the multi-period transaction problem setting. As all these issues require substantial effort, the authors reserve them for future exploration.

Doing business with not-fully-trustworthy partners in Silk Road Economic Belt countries is risky, and this study reveals how trust works in global cooperation and with strategic reactions in situations of partial trust.