The China-Europe Railway Express loading COVID-19 testing kits sets out from Haicang station in Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province bound for the Port of Duisburg, Germany on April 21, 2021. Photo: VCG

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a high-quality public good initiated by China and jointly built by all partners, whose benefits are shared by the world. It has attracted the participation of more than three-fourths of the countries in the world and 32 international organizations, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang stressed on Tuesday at a press conference during the ongoing two sessions.

Since it was proposed in 2013, the BRI has brought material benefits to the countries and regions involved, building a broad path for common development. During the past decade, the BRI has galvanized nearly $1 trillion of investment and established more than 3,000 new cooperative projects, creating 420,000 jobs for the countries and regions involved and lifting approximately 40 million people out of poverty, Qin said.

The China-Laos railway has transformed Laos into a land-linked country from a land-locked one. The Norochcholai power plant contributes to Sri Lanka's electricity supply. The Mombasa-Nairobi railway has driven local economic growth up by over 2 percentage points. 

The Luban Workshop, a China-supported skill and vocational training project, has helped young people from more than 20 countries obtain vocational skills. A total of 65,000 China-Europe freight train trips have formed a steel camel caravan linking Asia and Europe that transported anti-pandemic supplies, according to Qin.

China will hold the third BRI Forum for International Cooperation in 2023, and it hopes to take this opportunity to work with all relevant parties to forge ahead with more new achievements, Qin said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang attends a press conference on China's foreign policy and foreign relations on the sidelines of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, capital of China, March 7, 2023. Photo: Xinhua

"Holding the forum on the 10th anniversary of the BRI is of great importance. It's expected that the countries and regions involved will summarize their experience and build a consensus to promote the long-term, stable development of the initiative," Qian Feng, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Over the past 10 years, the building of the BRI has achieved notable outcomes, but it needs to seize new opportunities while dealing with new challenges as the international environment changes, so as to promote higher-quality development of the "BRI 2.0," Qian said, noting that the world has wide expectations for the development directions of the initiative.

"The BRI brings hope for the world to step out of economic doldrums, and will become the greatest contributor to a new round of economic globalization and global governance reform," Wei Jianguo, vice chairman of the China Center for International Economic Exchange and former vice minister of the Ministry of Commerce, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

In order to build the BRI into a globally high-quality cooperation platform, a five-year roadmap and timetable should be formed to make the top-down design more suitable for operation and more popular, with efforts to boost the link between Chinese modernization and the BRI, Wei said.

It should also reduce wealth and regional gaps to promote economic globalization toward opening-up, inclusiveness, balance and win-win outcomes, he said.

Despite the complicated international situation, the building of the BRI continues to demonstrate strong resilience and vitality. In the first two months of 2023, China's imports and exports with countries involved in the BRI reached 2.12 trillion yuan ($305.55 billion), up 10.1 percent year-on-year, data released by the General Administration of Customs showed on Tuesday.

Dismissing the fruitful achievements of the BRI, Western media keep hyping that the BRI has pushed relevant countries into debt traps.

"It is never China that should be accused of creating so-called debt traps," Qin stressed on Tuesday.

"Statistics showed that multilateral institutions and commercial creditors account for over 80 percent of their debt, which is the biggest source of their debt burdens. The US' unprecedented interest rate hikes last year caused massive capital outflows and negatively impacted their debt levels," Qin said.

China has been continually making an effort to reduce these countries' debt burdens and has made the greatest contribution to the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative, Qin said. 

China will continue to participate in the settlement of international debt problems with a constructive attitude, and it calls for other parties to take action and fairly share the burden, he said.

Foreign diplomats also refuted the so-called debt trap hyped by some Western media on Chinese overseas projects in recent interviews with the Global Times.

The Western media's reports are "fake news," Moin ul Haque, Ambassador of Pakistan to China, told the Global Times. He said the BRI and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor projects have greatly contributed to changing the economic landscape in Pakistan in infrastructure development and industrialization.