The Silk Road is one of the world’s most powerful brands, perhaps even bigger than Disney or Coca-Cola KO -0.8%. In my conversations across the region, whether speaking with a Chinese policy official or Egyptian taxi driver, simple mention of the Silk Road brings immediate recognition.
By adopting the concept to explain China’s own regional ambitions, President Xi Jinping has leveraged the brand at little cost. And his early November announcement that China would fund a $40 billion Silk Road Fund rightly caught news headlines around the world.
And yet trying to decipher the implications of China’s strategic ambition is less straightforward. What does it mean in practice?
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