 All right, good morning and welcome to the second lecture in the 2020-21 Levy series. Today we'll have Dr. Tim Winter from the University of Western Australia to speak to us on Silk Road and China's use of geocultural power to pursue its interest along with BRI and other projects. In a way, this is a good follow-up to our first lecture. For those of you who attended it, you remember the speaker talked about geography as a way of thinking in space, similarly to how history was a way to help you think in time. And on today's topic, we're looking essentially at a way how the Chinese are using history to act in space and access geography. So it's maybe more underground follow-up to what we heard about last week. So in a minute, I'll turn it over to Tim and then once the lecture's over, we'll unmute you and just raise your hands and Tim will take questions as they come in. So if there aren't any further ado, Tim Winter. Thanks, Chris. And hopefully everybody can hear me. And thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you. I think this is going to be a really interesting session. Hopefully it will connect with the other themes of the course and offer some different ways of thinking about how to think about international affairs. So as Chris says, I'm going to be looking at China's, as it says in that title, revival of the Silk Road. And of course, this is playing out in the context of the Belt and Road initiative. So what I want to do for the next, I guess, 40 minutes or so is speak to this quote here, which is from a new book by Philips and Rue Smith, which is called Culture and Order in World Politics, if anybody wants to look that up. And as they say there, with notable exceptions, IR scholars continue to write about culture as though nothing new has been said since the 1950s. And for their part, cultural specialists have done little to pay, little to apply their more recent insights to the issues that most concern IR scholars, not least questions of international order. So I'm a sociologist and I kind of think I really sit in between these two. And I guess I tried to bridge that divide and have done for the last couple of decades. And one of the ways in which I'm doing that, and have been doing that for the last few years is to address what's going on in the Belt and Road initiative. And I imagine all of you, or most of you will be familiar with this in one form or another. It's a project that was launched in 2013. Researchers around the world have been struggling to understand how to think about this Belt and Road initiative. It was originally called One Belt, One Road. That's been renamed in its English version in the last few years. And these are types of maps that you see that represent this project. And these are the types of maps and diagrams and graphics that get presented in reports, in think tank publications, in journalistic studies, and in other types of publications. And in here, you see this idea of this overland and the Maritime Silk Road, which is obviously the One Belt and the One Road, that are supposedly being revived for the 21st century. Now, I think there's something really interesting going on there. And hopefully I will be able to communicate that to you today. So what we've seen in the academic world is an explosion to give a not for a better word of academic production around how to think about this Belt and Road initiative. And as you see from these small sample of publications, there are a variety of themes that get discussed. But invariably, the focus is on Belt and Road as a geopolitical project, a geoeconomic or geostrategic project, with a focus overwhelmingly being given to trade infrastructure and transnational and transregional forms of connectivity across maritime and land-based domains. However, I've been sort of observing another theme, and this is what I'm going to talk about for you this morning. But in those stylistic representations of these two sweeping curves of the overland and Maritime Silk Road, what that also really kind of belies the complexity of is the ways in which China's been producing and leading a diplomatic architecture around its Belt and Road countries. So here's a few of the types of trips that Xi Jinping has been leading since 2013. In the bottom row, you see there visits to Kazakhstan, but also to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on the right-hand side there and to the left of Putin, but also to the UNESCO to launch this both as a bilateral and a multilateral way. Did you switch your slides? You're still on your same slide. I'm on where there's a grid of photographs. Is that not showing? No, it's not showing. Ah, that's annoying. It seems to have frozen. OK. Sharing is paused, it says. Resume share. That's odd. OK. Have I been deactivated as host or? I don't know. No, sir, you should still be a host and should still be able to share. I'll stop share and I'll restart it. Let's try it. No, yeah, let's try it. There it is. Does that work again? Yep. I'll go do now. Let's just get it to go full screen. Does that work? Yes. Yeah. OK, so it says you're screen sharing, right? So I'm not sure where you got to, but there was a kind of types of publications, which I hopefully you saw. Yep, that's where we lost it. Yeah, OK. So there was only one slide ahead of that. So this is what I was talking about in terms of both the types of bilateral and multilateral initiatives that has been launched under the Belt and Road agenda. And of course, to speak to that issue of the focus with an academia around infrastructure and trans-regional connectivities, this is a Washington based think tank that's been tracking the projects that China's been funding around the Eurasian continent and down to East Africa. And many of them now have either been rebranded or discussed and funded as Belt and Road projects since 2013. So you can see the scale of connectivity and investments that China's making around a number of regions. However, what gets far less attention is the other cultural projects and this use of history, this idea of the Silk Roads, partly because they don't attract the multi-million dollar contracts that the infrastructure projects do, but also because they're seen as somewhat trivial, less strategically significant, and so on and so forth. However, as I say, and the book I will show you later is an attempt to suggest there's far more going on here than has been acknowledged so far. So in terms of these cultural projects, how do we understand the significance of this? Is one of the questions which a number of people are now starting to really address. So here's a story from this week's Foreign Affairs or this most recent publication of Foreign Affairs which came out yesterday, which is by Ode Westad, which Yale historian of the Cold War, which discusses, as you can see from that title, what makes China tick and why does the US still struggle to understand China in certain respects. So as that opening line, or actually that clip is taken from halfway down the article, but it asserts that China's policy is driven by a toxic mix of nationalism and past grievances. Now that discussion of past grievances obviously invariably focuses on the century of humiliation as it's called within the modern period of Chinese history. However, what it doesn't begin to also address is the other types of history that are figuring into Chinese, both domestic policies and its international agenda. So for that we need to look at two articles such as this one, which is around Chinese political nostalgia and the idea of the dream of the great rejuvenation. This has been a project that's been in a number of years in the making and this article gives a very good example of that, which focuses on the use and privileging of deep histories now and the glorification of a Chinese civilization. And what we're seeing then is a conflation between the modern polity that is the Chinese, the PRC, the Chinese, or China as a country as we understand it today with its political boundaries and its institutions and the idea of a Chinese or cynic civilizational space in East Asia. Those are, as James Millwood writes, they're not so easy to align. We're seeing a political project of doing that in the 21st century under Xi Jinping. And therefore a number of Chinese commentators and academics are privileging the idea of a civilizational state that has many qualities and understandings that can lead international affairs and speak to the global agendas of the 21st century. So in that respect, what we're also seeing is huge investments in China into this revival of this cultural past and this civilizational past and a great pride in this deep cultural history of the country. So here's an example from Xi'an in Northwest China. And this is a city that's celebrated as the gateway of the Silk Road and the structure you can see in the far distance is the Pagoda of Shuanzang where Buddhism entered China, was supposedly into China centuries ago. So this is a public square that has been built in the last decade or so. It's just one of many, many examples of urban planning that now speaks to this pride and rejuvenation of this deep cultural past. And so I think there's something particularly significant going on there at the domestic level and the funds that are being invested in that. So what you see in that example in Xi'an is how it connects to this idea of the Silk Road. Now, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Silk Road but possibly not in any great detail. It has this vague imaginary to it about camels crossing deserts between East and West, trade routes between China and Europe. So it's very much this vague romanticized idea of history. So one of the things I've been sort of understanding or seeking to understand is how this idea came about in the modern world. And so it's exploded in the international attention given to the Silk Roads in the last few years, particularly on the back of Belt and Road. And if you go to Amazon, you'll see publication after publication after publication now talking about Silk Road histories. This is the example of the international bestseller, Peter Frankopown's book with the subtitle of the new history of the world. However, in the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna give you a bit of sense where this concept of the Silk Roads has come from. So back in 1870, or the early 1870s, the German geologist and geographer, Fernand von Röckstofen, who was also a baron, traveled to China, sponsored in part by the German government and some American and British corporations, with the prospect of building a trans-continental railway. Northwest China, there were heavy coal reserves and Europe, particularly Germany, was industrializing fast. There was anxieties about impending conflicts. And so coal was obviously part of the critical energy infrastructure of the late 19th century. Von Röckstofen had been surveying in the US in the years preceding this for the trans-continental railway, which again, I'm sure many of you are familiar with. So he was sponsored to try and survey Northwest China for a route that would connect all the way across to Europe. But he was also interested in history. And so on his return to a German university, he published a number of publications over the subsequent decades in a multi-volume series called China, the first of which included a chapter in German, the German equivalent of the Silk Roads. This spoke to some Chinese sources that he had found in China and some European documentation, very extremely vague and circumspect, about the trade route between Europe and particularly the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China. So the two centuries either side of the birth of Christ or the life of Christ and the trade routes which were fragmented, broken up, but there were a number of connections that seem to be historically passed down or knowledge about those being historically passed down of those connections during that kind of a Roman Empire Han Dynasty period. But what he was offering was a very, very small glimpse of pre-modern Eurasian connectivities and focused primarily on Northwest China as it is today and Central Asia. But the coining of that term didn't really gain any currency in academia and it only really began to gain some visibility in Europe, particularly in the public imagination in the 1930s. There were a number of reasons for that. Some of his students published books, notably the Swedish explorer Sven Hayden who was a great writer, a great expedition or traveler and he was sponsored by Lufthansa in the 1930s to scope out potential airports up in Northwest China for linking, again, and peaking to Western Europe through a multi-stop airline route or airport route. So in that time, as you see from this Ngram, that was the moment when the Silk Road begins to enter the public imagination, but as what that slide also illustrates is it doesn't really gain currency until the 1980s. So, sorry, I should have shown that side. That slide is the expeditions that were taking place in the 1930s, including Sven Hayden's trip that gave popularity to this idea of a trans-continental route. If we go back to that slide, what you see during the Cold War is that the idea of a trans-regional, trans-continental history really has very little currency. There are geo-cultural, geo-cleavages of the Cold War and so Western academic scholars are not able to get into Soviet states to build on the research of the 1920s and 30s that was beginning to gain momentum. And so it only really surfaces again at the end of the Cold War and the need to write a history, a pre-modern history of globalization that kind of offered some interpretation to what was going on in the 1990s. However, there was one country that did continue to invest some energy and had interest in the Silk Road and that was Japan. So what happened in Japan after the Second World War was the country needed to rebuild its relations with its Southeast Asian neighbors and with China after the devastating events of that Second World War in the East Asian theater of conflict. So the Silk Road became this platform to rebuild Sino-Japanese relations. So what you see there in those two central slides is Tanaka's visit to Mao in Peking in 72 just after Nixon visited upon which the proposal happened of a documentary that would trace the Silk Roads between East Asia or China and Japan that was made in that by the two state broadcasters, NHK and CCTV in the mid 1970s and broadcasters around the world in the early 1980s. Japan or Tokyo hosted the first Olympics in Asia after the Second World War and the carrier of the flag as you see there who was born on the day of the bombing of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima carried the Silk Road or a number of people obviously carried along what was turned the Southern Silk Road for a number of countries from Athens as it made its way across to East Asia for the in the run up in the weeks running up to that Olympic event. So what we see is that the Silk Road starts to gain visibility as is trans regional trans cultural history but it also enters an arena of international diplomacy and this really takes off at the end of the Cold War when the UN are concerned with rebuilding international relations and obviously the East West and reducing suspicions between East and West. And so the Silk Road gains this currency to tell the story of peaceful harmonious relations between regions between countries and between civilizations. So UNESCO runs a decade long project from 1988 to the 1997 which involves a whole series of events including conferences, scholarly publications, museum exhibitions and and a journalistic reports in a multitude of countries from South America right across to Northern Europe. Now what also took place were a number of expeditions and that's what this map here demonstrates and these were again tracing these pre-modern connections and very much privileging not the story of empires and conflict and piracy but a story of peaceful harmonious connections the story of spice roots, the story of trade of silk and merchants crossing oceans and frontiers and also seafaring history. So it was very much a romanticized nostalgia of pre-modern Eurasian history. What we see there then which is also quite interesting is this dramatic expansion of the geographies of the Silk Road from von Richtofen's original notion in the 1870s of a singular route that connects Northwest China around that area that's Kashgar, Rumchi and Dunhuang across to Southern Europe. But now we have it spanning up into Japan down through the Red Sea and all the way down to Southeast Asia. There were reasons why that happened which I won't go into but I can recommend some publications later if anybody's interested in that. And what we also see then is the idea of the maritime Silk Road entering international policy or international cultural policy for the first time. So in that ship you see in the top left there is the Fulk Al-Salamar which was lent to the UN by the Sultan of Oman during the First Gulf War of 1990 to 1991 with the country not wanting to be drawn into that conflict and wanting to be seen as part of the international community promoting peace around the region. So he lent the ship to the UN where it left Venice, went through the Suez Canal flying the flag of the United Nations all the way across to the Korean Peninsula and into Southern Japan. Telling the story of peaceful relations peaceful maritime connectivities that should be restored in a post Cold War era. Journalists and academics were on board lots of lectures were given and these journalists obviously wrote these up for the global media. Now post 9-11 the Silk Road story returns to Central Asia and Southern Asia on the back of 9-11 the events of 9-11. So what you see in the bottom left and right hand side there is the Washington Mall the Smithsonian Institute runs a Silk Road's Roads of Dialogue exhibition through the summer exhibition in a year immediately after 9-11 so 2002. And this is what I would suggest potentially the most strategically important sort of public and diplomatically significant public space in the world. So this was telling the story of Central Asia and the Muslim world is not necessarily just the source of extreme fundamentalist Islam but also a region of peaceful cultural connectivities that stretches back centuries. So it was trying to present another narrative of that region. This also gets picked up in the United Nations again so Khatami the Iranian leader post 9-11 also signals this language of the dialogue of civilizations and at that time, Koichira Matsura was a director general of UNESCO at that time and he was instrumental in leading that Roads of Dialogue project during the 1980s that was led by UNESCO. So he supports this dialogue of civilizations and the Silk Roads is a good example of one of the ways in which that language should be given a geographical and historical form. So whilst Huntington was talking about the clash of civilizations, there were organizations around the world that were trying to shift the language and the relationship between civilizational histories and international relations in a much more positive and productive way and obviously organizations like the UN were a part of that. So what we see though, then and one of the things I've been arguing the last few years is that from that initial 1870s idea of so-called Robert Richtofen's notion of a Silk Root in his quite narrow conception of this idea of silk trade between Han Dynasty China and the Roman Empire, we've seen this dramatic expansion, both in time where the quintessential Silk Road traveler in Europe is Marco Polo, but Marco Polo doesn't travel to the 13th century. So we have this history, this one term that spans now 2000 or even 3000 years and an entire continent and oceans. So one of the things I think what we've seen and what I've tried to indicate to you in the last few minutes is that it comes to be associated with certain ideals and values, the ideas of cross-cultural dialogue, peace and cooperation, peaceful relations and dialogue between civilizations. The idea that cosmopolitan is a good thing for humanity and is in a historical natural order. In the post-Cold War, it's about telling the story of peaceful East-West relations and creating those forms of dialogue, but also the ways in which we can have interpolity relations. So the Silk Road becomes this powerful way to narrate those types of histories in the modern era. And of course, what we've seen then is that in the age of Belt and Road, China and Xi Jinping is co-opting this for a very strategic and what is perhaps the most ambitious foreign policy agenda ever launched by a single country. So there you see Xi Jinping visiting UNESCO less than six months after the launch of Belt and Road, saying that civilizations are the future of peaceful international affairs and that China can lead the way in this. And the Silk Road is the demonstration of China's peaceful engagement with its own region and with other regions historically, such as Europe and the African continent. Now that map there is a more familiar map in terms of what you might see again in a number of academic and think tank publications of the economic and developmental corridors of Belt and Road and the New York Asia land bridge. And these are critical in terms of how China has in a 2015 report, strategized how to direct its investments across these different regions. And that blue dotted line is the maritime Silk Road of the 21st century as it's often documented. But what we've also seen is an increase as I mentioned in the cultural sector and what these number of dots show you here are the locations that are now being identified by the UNESCO organizations and its advisory bodies such as ICAMOS, which is based in Paris. Of all the locations that could and should be designated as Silk Road World Heritage sites. Now, World Heritage, you may think is just a particular brand and a brand for promoting tourism and managing and profiteering from that. But for a number of countries, whether it's Iran, China, India, this has become the cultural Olympics. It demonstrates civilizational histories. It demonstrates pride that speaks back for those eras of empire and colonialism. Same with a whole series of countries around the world. So it has a really deep political investment in different regions. And so this idea of rather than signaling this is a particular historically important site for one country, the Silk Road says that these places are historically important because they show a whole series of historical, religious, cultural connectivities or scientific connectivities. So the blue dots were listed in 2014 as a transnational, transboundary nomination where China joined up with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and created a Buddhist corridor that runs up through Northwest China into those neighboring countries, which is one of the first transboundary Silk Road nominations to actually be listed. What we're seeing now is a whole series of countries grouping together in regional configurations to bring those other dots, whether it's green or red ones that into further Silk Road nominations are gonna see that over the coming years. What that doesn't tell you obviously is the maritime Silk Road. So there's a whole another policy agenda to produce reporting and a policy initiative that will match that overland for the next 20 to 30 years that balance out that maritime history to world history. But what this begins to show you then is how this historical idea of the Silk Road overlays with the developmental corridors of Belt and Road. This is important because China has about 150 million Chinese tourists going out every year before COVID and that will resume no doubt after COVID borders and international borders resume over the next four to five years. And this has huge economic power to and I'll come back to that later. It's not only in terms of on the ground development but I'll give you some examples why I think this is much more than just soft power because of the ways in which this now folds in the digital economies of countries and the 5G technologies and digital Silk Road platforms that China's rolling out through Belt and Road. But I'll come back to that shortly. So as well as that hard infrastructure on the ground of Silk Road histories that you can see within archeological and historic urban landscapes that get transformed into World Heritage we're also seeing an explosion of cultural activities around festivals, field festivals, food and film festivals, theater alliances telling the story of Silk Road connectivities. Now this is very much an invented history you could argue given that the term only goes back 130 or so years but what we're seeing is a whole number of countries jumping on this to demonstrate and try and argue to their own populations and to an international community that they were friends 1300 years ago or 1000 years ago. They were friends on the Silk Road and reviving the Silk Road for the 21st century is about reviving friendships and trusts and trade and dialogue. This has powerful connotations in a number of regions where it's being framed, all this cultural stuff is being framed as a dialogue of Asian civilizations. So in the West, Silk Road history is often seen as a East-West connectivity but in Asia it's seen as an intra-regional Asia. The histories of connections between the Arab world, the Buddhist world and so on and so forth. This is really powerful language today where reviving the Silk Roads is about reviving these non-Western pride, these non-Western geographies, these non-Western trade relations that is proclaimed to be that were suppressed through centuries or eras of European colonialism and a world system that put Europe at the center of international trade and geopolitics. So this idea of reviving historical connections is far more powerful than I think most people in the West have taken credit or given credit to in the last few years. So what we see here is an example of a museum, not in China but in Singapore. So this is a number of countries that are responding to this language about maritime silk road. I emphasize this terminology only really goes back 30 years but this is being picked up by a number of countries signaling to their own populations that Singapore's place in the world needs to return to the sea that this is strategically important. This is critical for a country like Singapore with the Belt and Road infrastructure programs potentially cutting it out of the transcontinental shipping routes that it's been so powerfully engineering in the last few decades. So here's an example of a public diplomacy project within the Singaporean geographies of the city state. Now what we're also seeing is investments in China's uptake around a maritime archeology and one level that seems quite trivial. But if you take those two gray circles there what we're seeing is a convergence between where the Belt and Road infrastructure projects are happening and the cultural sector projects around the silk road histories. And in this case it's Kenya and Sri Lanka and the maritime archeology projects that China is now leading in those two regions that converge with its bigger Belt and Road partners. So what we see in countries like Sri Lanka is this idea of rewriting regional histories where it's beneficial for China to say that it was a center of a civilizational zone that China is a maritime historical power and a peaceful one on power with any European maritime power historically, but also for countries like Sri Lanka this helps them place themselves within an Indian Ocean past and future that has massive strategic benefits. The language of reviving the silk roads of the 21st century is all about reviving peaceful connectivities. So for Sri Lanka, for a small country like Sri Lanka this helps them rekindle ideas of a peaceful Indian Ocean zone which was their contribution to the non-alignment non-aligned movement during the Cold War as you see in this slide here. So picking up the themes that China is pushing through the Belt and Road initiative and this idea of reviving peaceful inter-polity relations, inter-cultural relations historically, this is very productive for a small country like Sri Lanka as it maneuvers between the European Union, China, India and the US in the 21st century. So what we're therefore witnessing is huge investments in maritime underwater archaeology and port histories in China. So those are the examples of institutions that have opened in the country over the last few years. This is a dramatic shift for China in embracing its maritime past in a way that it distanced itself from obviously given these associations that the sea has in terms of the century of humiliation and the treaty port system that was set up through the British during the mid-19th century. So this is China revisiting the oceans and the seas around it in terms of its own projections of the past into the future. So this is coupled with significant investments and for deep water underwater and ocean bed searching. About a month ago, I think I'm right in saying China has now had a crude submersible that's reached the bottom, the deepest part of the oceans floor and setting the world record for this. And so what we're also seeing in terms of space exploration China's investing heavily in ocean bed exploration as I'm sure many of you are aware. And part of that is a search for shipwrecks across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. And I would refer you to the work of Jeff Adams who's been writing some really interesting stuff over the last six or seven years and the importance, strategic importance of shipwreck archeology in China's historical claims towards the South China Sea. So whilst there's a lot of attention and media attention around islands and the infrastructure bases there's other stuff going on as well that doesn't receive the press that it deserves. So what that slide there shows you is the Nanhai One Museum in Southern China that is a wreck that was found in the South China Sea that now has its own dedicated museum. So you might think these are just individual museums but China's been undertaking an extraordinary explosion of museums around its country. 4,100 opened over a six to seven year period. It now has more than 5,000 museums up from just 375 in the 1970s. So this is a dramatic uptake in its revaluing its revisiting of its history. Now, as I'm sure many of you would be familiar with often it's a country such as China doesn't do these things for on a whim. There are particular and strategic reasons why it might be investing this scale of funds into that cultural policy. Now, what this slide begins to give you an example of is the ways in which this idea of a maritime past is being connected to the future. So those meta tags or those key words you see at the bottom, eco cities, belt mode initiatives, Zheng He, coastal China, temples, smart cities, the maritime Silk Road. This is very much about saying this is a maritime past, this is a maritime future for the country. Now, why is that significant? Well, I'll give you a sense of that in a second but it's accompanied with this big investment in public sculptures. Again, perhaps potentially very trivial. These have emerged over the last 10 to 15 years, whether it's admiral such as Zheng He or sea goddesses that tell the story of the spread of religion and China's outward connections to the Arab world, to the Persian world and so on and so forth that are being rekindled for the 21st century. We're seeing children's cartoons. This one on the Maritime Silk Road won the best TV program just a month ago in China. Why is it a children's television program significant? Well, I'll bring you to the example of Britain. I grew up in the UK and Trafalgar Square that you see in that slide was central to my sort of schooling education. And I didn't understand that as a child of why that's significant. But reading this book a number of decades later, which I guess some of you are familiar with if not all of you, it tells a story of sea power states. And the book very much differentiates between sea power and the idea of a sea state. And I quote from page six. And what basically Andrew Lambert identifies that there have been five powers in history that have defined themselves for a sea culture and a maritime culture. And that's Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic and Britain. And I quote from page six where he states that in the contemporary world today, and that's today, Russia, China and the United States all possess sea power. A strategic option that can be exercised by any state with a coast, money and manpower. These continental military superpowers are not sea powers. The sea is at best a marginal factor in their identities. And so the whole book really traces out what that difference between a continental power and a sea power is. So I think when I give those examples of public art, children's television around maritime histories, that explosion of museums, a number of which are then now dedicated to the maritime histories. What we might be seeing in China in the 21st century is a cultivation of a sea culture and the transformation of China not just into a continental power, but also into a sea power in the way that Andrew Lambert's described in his book. Now it's where these silk clothes in this idea of a maritime silk and overland silk is gaining currency and why it's particularly powerful, I think in 21st century international affairs is that it's being picked up by a whole series of intergovernmental organizations and intergovernmental bodies. So you see a few examples of that here. And this brings me back to that idea of the ways in which the ideas and values and associations that the silk road has had attached to it become associated with the term in the 20th century around peaceful relations, harmonious trade, harmonious intercultural dialogue, so on and so forth. So these countries now are very much pushing this on the back of the Belt and Road Initiative. So UNESCO is spending heavily, investing heavily and bringing in multilateral programs for this silk roads program. And I encourage you to go to their site to illustrate, to give you a sense of the themes that they're pushing now. They have 18 themes. So this is now being seen by UNESCO in Paris as phase two from the end of that Cold War multilateral program of the silk roads. They've now in the age of Belt and Road amending up their phase two and building these multi-sector, whether it's science, education, culture, or in this case from this slide you see here, exchanges and histories of medicine and chemistry, which has been accelerated because of COVID. So UNESCO as with other UN agencies are very much foregrounding international cooperation and international dialogue. And their anxiety is about the closing of international borders with COVID. And I spoke to the director of this program yesterday who indicated that the silk roads for them is now a project to indicate that transnational, transregional, transcontinational exchange trade is always the natural state of affairs. It's historical state of affairs that's been undermined by COVID and it's the state of affairs that we should be returning to in a post COVID world. So what we'll also, this program does, which being pushed by UNESCO, but also UN Habitat, UNHCR and other organizations within the UN system is the idea of the silk roads can produce forms of dialogue between the youth of the world. So this is an example of the youth eyes that is now being framed as a silk roads project, which is about generating international dialogue between younger generations across borders. And so the silk road then also plugs into the UN's SDGs, the 17 goals that it's identified for the next decade or so that about poverty reduction, intercultural dialogue, addressing climate change. And so all of these agendas are being plugged into this silk road program across the UN system, primarily through UNESCO but by other agencies as well. And it brings us back to those Belt and Road developmental corridors and reducing poverty through tourism and so on and so forth. So what I'm giving you a sense here then is that you might read in a number of US, Washington based think tank publications that China has hardly any soft power, but the presentation I'm suggesting to you this morning is that through the silk roads initiatives China's got a lot more soft power than we may think. And it's using the UN and international agencies to do that. What I also want to do just in the final few minutes is to say that this is more than just soft power than we're seeing here today. I'll give you example of tourism and why I think that has significant political implications that are more than just a nice notion of soft power in the 21st century. So this report here was published last year by the UNWTO, the World Tourism Organization that identified the idea of a maritime silk road for the 21st century around connectivities for infrastructure investment around tourism. East Asia, particularly China and Japan have the world's fastest growing cruise ship market. And that's obviously been suspended because of COVID but surprisingly the cruise ship markets rebounding quicker than you would expect through as borders and mobilities reopen in the post COVID transition world, particularly in East Asia. And so these are locations which are the cruise ship ports and identified that should be the locations for this maritime silk road cruise ship industry. Now this is very much extending this idea of a maritime sea history outwards from China to show that China again its influence stretches across the Mediterranean stretches across the Indian Ocean all the way across to the Mediterranean up the Red Sea up through the Suez Canal. And this is telling the story of a China's historical connectivities in a peaceful, benign way but also the spread of Chinese civilization and the positive impact it's had historically and therefore encouraging the 1.4 billion people to get behind the Belt and Road Initiative and see the legitimacy of the state's agenda for this extremely ambitious and therefore risky foreign policy program of Belt and Road. Now where that's more than just soft power is that the huge infrastructure programs that are coming around this a number of countries wholly depend or cities particularly but a number of countries heavily if not wholly depend on international tourism. So this slide here is from Malacca which is one of the key infrastructure nodes of the Belt and Road Project in Southeast Asia and Malaysia. And as you see from that top left that's an urban development project that's part of the $9 billion gateway Malacca program that's part of a deep water port just up from Singapore but also is about the connections of the maritime Silk Road historically where Zheng He's voyages in the 15th century the Chinese Admiral sailed across from Southern China stopped off in Malacca as he voyaged onwards to cross the Indian Ocean down into East Africa. So this and there's a number of overseas Chinese in Malaysia and Malacca in particular who want to celebrate these histories and profit economically from the tourism that these types of histories will generate. If we turn to the Black Sea region this is the Black Sea Economic Corporation organization that is pushing Silk Road tourism to lure that part of that outbound Chinese market to the West Asia region and the Southern Europe region. And this is being supported again by the UNWTO the World Tourism Organization which is coming up with the idea of a Western Silk Road which draws this geography of connectivity and this idea of romanticized pre-modern connectivities and trade that is not about conflict that's not about the conflicts of the modern era in the Balkans region that's tore this Black Sea region apart in the last 30 or so years but is celebrating histories of peaceful intercultural interreligious dialogue to promote tourism and relations within the region but also to capture that East Asian market. That has big infrastructure implications for cruise ship industries and the port investments in the Black Sea region and in the Mediterranean as that will unfold over the next 20 to 30 years. But what we're also seeing then is the ways in which for the US market for tourists visiting internationally or for European tourists that will be Google sorry, it will be WhatsApp it will be a whole suite of mobile app programs that will be underpinning supporting an international tourism market the Airbnb phenomena so on and so forth that we've all become familiar with the last few years but in the Chinese world of international tourism there's a whole app ecology and a mobile app economy that these countries such as Turkey such as Bulgaria are now being encouraged to be drawn into. So what you see that slide is a number of Chinese think tanks so they're offering advice to these countries in Southern Europe to say if you wanna be visible on this hugely profitable Chinese outbound tourism industries you need to be on this app economy on the WeChat programs promoting your country, your locations your industries to this outbound Chinese market. So here's some examples there's not just about tourism promotion it's been about international payment platforms and that's been obviously a kind of a significant geopolitical dimension of the 20th century in terms of the influence of Visa and Mastercard I've had and the fallacies they've had for the Western financial systems and China is now trying to counter that with its own international payment systems such as Alipay and WeChat and so on and so forth that are enticing these countries to draw it into that sphere. And as you can see there the huge scale of usage of these apps for the outbound Chinese tourist and giving credibility to those claims that if you're not on these systems you are invisible. Now that's more than just payment structures that's more about international finance it's also bringing new ways to think about big data systems, the link, heritage, tourism, development, cultural dialogue into this new world of AI, big data gathering. So here's just one example of that that's being linked to smart cities international marketing of these cities and the whole ecosystems that we're seeing being built around this kind of international travel industry. Here's one final example that I give you from the Armenian tourism industry that's about this supposedly a project that's about measuring customer satisfaction around Silk Road tourism in Armenia which is in sort of the West Asia, Central Asia region. But you might be interested to know that this travel insights program is being sponsored by the UNDP and the Russian government. So clearly there's some interesting developments happening here and this use of big data through these industries, through these connectivities through these people to people exchanges that are part of the Belter Mode initiative that is not reaching the international media and the critique that I think it deserves. So finally I'm gonna give you the counter to a lot of this China initiative which is one example among a number which comes from India which is the response of India in the last few years has been to say that well if China is pushing this maritime Silk Road and the idea of an overland Silk Road as a strategic architecture to build alliances in the 21st century we need to respond. And their project to do that is project Morsam. Morsam is the Arabic word for monsoon winds. So what this is a project to build a geostrategic block of around 20 to 25 countries around the Indian Ocean that puts Indian, the India with a center of a strategic geography using histories as to say that we have always been connected to this region. Again, this is a domestic project and an international diplomacy project to say that we have always been tied historically culturally religious connections and we should be reviving those for the 21st century whether it's down to Southeast Asia or across to East Africa. So that's been gaining momentum again in the last 12 months or so. And I encourage you to sort of look at that because that's very much about India reconfiguring its strategic interests away from land-based invasions which is what it suffered over a number of centuries obviously towards its maritime domain which is largely ignored in the recent decades strategically. So that's it. There's the publication that I've mentioned a couple of times, Geocultural Power that hopefully maps out a whole series of those themes and threads and there's a website that I've got up online that's called silkroadfutures.net which gives you a sense of some of those themes I've talked about this morning but also presents a number of those videos and opens up to other themes and gives you some indication of other publications that are on there that speak to the kind of topics that I've been talking about. Thank you. Great, thank you, Tim.