The Belt and Road Initiative Under the Diplomacy Perspective of the Great Power with Chinese Characteristics

Abstract

In 1877, Ferdinand von Richthofen, a German geographer, defined the traffic route linking China, Transoxiana in Central Asia and India mainly for silk trade during Western Han and Eastern Han Dynasties as “Silk Roads” in the Volume I of his book China: The Results of My Travels and the Studies Based Thereon, he thought the economic and cultural exchange on the land and sea developed in the folk was the main reason for the flourish of the “Silk Road”, but as the western countries knew more and more about China and China’s cognition of the world reduced since the Yuan Dynasty, China gradually walked to isolation and declined in the Qing Dynasty.