By Akhilesh Pillalamarri
China’s latest South Asian addition to the Silk Road: Nepal.
As The Diplomat previously reported, China has been in the process of setting up two major infrastructure and transportation corridors between China and the Middle East and Europe. One corridor, the Maritime Silk Road, extends westwards through Southeast Asia, while the overland Silk Road Economic Belt goes through Central Asia.
Both routes largely skirt around South Asia though this is not necessarily by design. Chinese officials have been cajoling India to join the New Silk Road though India has been reluctant to do so. However, many of India’s neighbors such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives have been eager to participate in China’s Silk Road project. Indian reluctance to join the Silk Road is partially fueled by its wariness of China making inroads into its neighborhood, but this seems to be happening anyway. Small countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal do not embrace Chinese investment to spite India, but for their own economic and political reasons. In a previous article, I warned that South Asian countries would begin to integrate economically with East Asian economies, especially China, individually if they could not do so as a bloc. Yet integration as a bloc within South Asia, in the manner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), seems unlikely because of the failure of India’s economy to open up enough or perform well enough to drive the entire economy of South Asia (Pakistan’s obscurantism is also responsible). Despite welcome moves by the Modi government, reform will be hard and slow and its effects will not be evident for several years.
Read the full story at The Diplomat