G7’s rival to Beijing’s Belt and Road

BORIS JOHNSON has pledged to combat China’s economic expansionism by setting up a rival to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative – a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organisations.

The Prime Minister addressed five MPs and members of the House of Lords hit by sanctions from Beijing – including former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – telling them that he was planning to commit ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ alongside other G7 countries.

Hosting the parliamentarians, all members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, in the No10 garden, he said: ‘China has been buying up great chunks of the world, and indebting countries across Africa. We need to give the developing world a choice between their system and ours.’

Veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger has said the US will have to reach a mutual understanding with China on a new global order to ensure stability or the world will face serious unresolved tensions in future.

Kissinger, 97, speaking at a Chatham House event in London via Zoom, said: ‘If we don’t get to an understanding with China... then we will be in a pre-World War I-type situation in Europe, in which there are perennial conflicts that get solved on an immediate basis but one of them gets out of control at some point. It is infinitely more dangerous now than it was then’.