March 19, 2020 – Minimizing disruption to class learning, the Center for Finance EMBA at Tsinghua PBCSF has been organizing a number of online sharing sessions for its students. On Thursday, the Center invited Henry Tillman, a top BRI expert and the Founder of China Outbound Investments, to share his insights and options on the BRI investment successes and objectives 2019 - 2020 Q1. As many EMBA students have businesses connected to the Belt and Road Initiative, Tillman provided a helpful update on the ongoing BRI projects and their future development trends.

Over 50 students from the Belt and Road Initiative EMBA Program (BRI EMBA) participated in this Cloud Class. Tillman joined in from London and students joined in from the Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and other parts of the world. With many students of the BRI EMBA Program living across Asia and eager to return to Beijing, the session provided a platform for students to continue learning and exchanging ideas during the COVID-19 global quarantine.

Tillman began by talking about the BRI Model’s adjusting to historical shifts within the Chinese economic model. He pointed out that in just 6 years of time since the launch of BRI, China has made phenomenal progress in its effort to trans-continentally improve connectivity and regional cooperation, in spite of the emergence of challenges such as the “debt trap” propaganda, the so-called security breach of Huawei, tariffs and sanctions, offensive US arctic expansions, and “black forces in Hong Kong”.

In 2019, the BRF II successfully concluded with 283 cooperation deliverables being reached, another 16 countries and international organizations signed BRI cooperation agreements with China (bringing the total number to over 140 countries), in addition to the steady progress made in such major projects as the China-Laos Railway, the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway, the Budapest-Belgrade Railway, the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. Tillman underscored a shift from G2G to B2B by talking about a series of B2B agreements – signed in the weeks before, during and/or after the BFR II.

With respect to bilateral trade, Tillman noted that despite all the noise and propaganda about the trade war, there was marginal growth in bilateral trade. Discussing about the cooperation opportunities between China and India, he remarked on the significance of the SCO Summit and the potential of an India-Nepal economic corridor. “In a span of 2 years from 2017 to 2010, there was an increase of about 700 million to 3.5 billion in the number of Chinese investors in India’s tech sector”, said Tillman, whilst giving an overview of the 2019 Chinese tech investment landscape in India.

Tillman then went on to the second part of his presentation in which he discussed about the BRI developments in Q1 2020 so far. With the recent coronavirus headwinds dragging down economic activities across the globe, the progress of BRI projects is inevitably affected. Nevertheless, as Tillman commented, we still see a lot of engagements in Myanmar, Laos, Bangladesh and the Silk Road, with a range of highway projects, construction of G2G economic zones, and communication infrastructure projects. “Despite the decline in outbound investments, there is no decline in volume,” he said, highlighting the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor (ILSTC), the Lancang-Mekong Economic Development Belt (LMC) and the China-Laos Economic Corridor (CLEC).

Lastly, Tillman weighed in on the key things for 2020 going forward. He pointed out that more tech hubs will spring up in the ASEAN region, in addition to the established hubs in Hong Kong and Singapore. For the current decade, he sees Indonesia and Malaysia being the main players, with the Philippines and Thailand also emerging gradually. In Singapore, which is a historical BRI partner as well as the center of the Southeast Asian capital market and tech ecosystem, investments have begun to diversify away from FinTech towards AI, healthcare, biomedical, and energy, a trend that will prevail in 2020 for BRI investments, said Tillman. Other BRI advancements in logistics, including the NEAL-NET Intelligent Ports, eWTP Cainiao SMART Logistics Network and Malaysian e-hub all signal the fact that the next part of the growth in the BRI for the next several years is going to be in digital. “The future of the world is going east, not west”, Tillman remarked.

During the Q&A session, students actively engaged with Tillman and raised a great number of questions and concerns with regard to BRI. They exchanged views on the development of SEZs in Africa, balance of interests given the current global geopolitical uncertainties, BRI profitability of hydro and wind power, BRI investments in healthcare and biotech, opportunities arising from the coronavirus epidemic in regard to the global supply chain etc.

This “Cloud Class” series of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) EMBA Program will continue to be a place for students and lecturers to share ideas during this special time. With almost 70% of the students enrolled in the BRI EMBA based overseas, remote learning and online class meetings could actually benefit students in terms of time and location flexibility. The Center of Finance EMBA has also been organizing a number of other online exchanges for students of the Chinese EMBA Program. Prior to the virus outbreak, the Center had already been in a process of transforming traditional classroom pedagogy and finding new mechanisms of student-teacher interaction,

Since its inception in May 2017, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) EMBA Program has attracted more than 180 high-level enterprise decision-makers from 22 countries and regions, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the United States, Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan. A number of students from Southeast Asian Countries hold Tan Sri, Dato' Sri, Dato’, Tengku and other honorary titles. Nearly 40% of the students graduated from world-renowned universities such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London.