"China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is nothing if not vague. Is it a blanket term for all Chinese overseas economic, social and political activities? Is it a specific set of coordinated policy that’s exclusive to Beijing-led international endeavors? What projects are officially Belt and Road? Where do the corridors actually go? What countries are truly participating? Nearly seven years into the initiative, we are still asking these questions as Beijing attempts to wrangle back its message from private firms and enterprising governments that have unscrupulously been using the Belt and Road brand for their own gains, dragging its reputation through the proverbial mud and putting the future of the initiative in jeopardy. The Belt and Road was announced in 2013 as an economic development initiative that would create new trade corridors across Asia, Europe and Africa, positioning China at the top of the geo-economic food chain, while providing mutual benefit to participants all the way down the line. Beyond that vague rendering, the rest was left to conjecture, with a large degree of meaning lost between China’s struggles to explain the initiative and the West’s inability to comprehend it.“I think the difference among policy makers is one of the biggest challenges of the Belt and Road,” said Moritz Rudolf, a China researcher, lawyer, and founder of Eurasia Bridges. “For the Chinese side it's unclear why the West doesn’t understand what they are doing and from the Western side it's ‘this is nothing because it doesn't follow our procedures that we know about.’”..."