China’s Belt and Road Initiative will keep testing the West

TEN YEARS ago this week China’s leader, Xi Jinping, began laying the tarmac for what would become his signature foreign policy. He began with vague suggestions of reviving the Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes linking China with Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. When the plan was given an official name—“One Belt, One Road”—it suggested that China was putting itself back at the centre of the world. Later it would be softened, for the benefit of foreign audiences, to the “Belt and Road Initiative”, or BRI. Mr Xi modestly hailed it as the “project of the century”.