China to issue guideline on Silk Road initiative

China's central government has approved a guideline on the "One Belt, One Road" initiatives, which is expected to be announced soon, media reports said Tuesday.

The draft guideline for the "One Belt, One Road" initiatives - which refer to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, has been circulated among several government departments, news portal cnstock.com reported on Tuesday, quoting an unidentified source.

The initiatives are expected to promote growth and economic cooperation in Asia and will involve several sectors including trade, investment and currency exchange, experts said.

The "One Belt, One Road" initiatives were launched by President Xi Jinping in 2013, under which China aims to support partner countries along the routes in terms of infrastructure construction and cultural development.

Xi said during a meeting in November that China should "prepare timetables and road maps for the coming years for the 'one belt and one road' initiatives", the official Xinhua News Agency reported on November 6, 2014.

The full text of the guideline is expected to be published soon, cnstock.com's report said.

Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is expected to be set as a core area in the Silk Road Economic Belt and a raft of preferential policies is expected to be rolled out for the region in the near future, the report said.

In addition, Lianyungang in East China's Jiangsu Province would become a starting point of a communication route to Europe under the initiatives, according to the report.

Besides Lianyungang, several other communication routes such as one from Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province to India via Southwest China's Yunnan Province are expected to be developed under the plan, Xu Hongcai, director of the Department of Information under the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, a Beijing-based think tank, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Infrastructure construction projects may be an important part of the plan which is expected to involve trillions of dollars worth of investment in the next few years, Xu said.

The huge capital requirement, which is difficult to meet by existing financing channels, is expected to fit with the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) investment model encouraged by the Chinese government to attract more private capital, Zhang Jianping, a research fellow with the Academy of Macroeconomic Research under the National Development and Reform Commission, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Besides, China set aside tens of billions of dollars from its foreign exchange reserves to establish the Silk Road Fund in November 2014 as a lever, hoping to bring in larger-scale bank financing and private capital from China and abroad.

There is huge potential for cooperation with the countries involved in the projects, and besides infrastructure construction, comprehensive economic cooperation will be promoted through free trade agreements and bilateral currency swap mechanism, Xu said.