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Singapore: The Belt and Road’s Gateway to India

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ASEAN Beat

Singapore: The Belt and Road’s Gateway to India

Singaporean companies facilitate Chinese Belt and Road funding in outspoken critic, India.

Singapore: The Belt and Road’s Gateway to India

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, left, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pose for the media ahead of their meeting in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Jan. 25, 2018.

Credit: AP Photo

Next year, the United Nations’ convention on mediation is to be named after Singapore. The city-state’s position as a neutral mediator has been in focus since hosting the U.S.-North Korea summit on June 12. However, Singapore has also been the partner of choice in facilitating cooperation, particularly for businesses, between the larger conflicting nations, China and India, since 2015. What is especially interesting is Singapore’s role in India, where it has acted as an intermediary for Chinese investment as a part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The success of Sino-Indian cooperation on the commercial front lends hope for the future of the political relationship considering the recent warming of ties between the two states.

India has been one of the BRI’s biggest critics. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) days before the Singapore summit on June 10, India was the only country to renounce China’s BRI, a trillion-dollar global investment project, on the grounds that it encroached upon the sovereignty and territorial integrity of participating countries. In the past, New Delhi lawmakers have criticized the BRI’s China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through what India considers its territory in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. For its part, Beijing has been accepting of New Delhi’s perspective, conceding that the latter’s position is “quite normal” and emphasizing a common desire to support “interconnectivity.”

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