THE Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will be held from May 14 to 15 in Beijing, and President Xi Jinping will attend the opening ceremony and host the round table summit of the leaders, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said yesterday morning.

    China will gather its friends and allies together for the summit, its biggest diplomatic event of the year, with 28 heads of state and government leaders due to attend the forum.

    The Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to build a new Silk Road linking Asia, Africa and Europe, is a landmark program to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure projects including railways, ports and power grids.

    China has dedicated US$40 billion to a Silk Road Fund and the idea was the driving force behind the establishment of the US$50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

    Wang announced a list of those attending the conference, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

    Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and Indonesian President Joko Widodo are also coming.

    “One Belt and One Road is to date the most important public good China has given to the world, first proposed by China but for all countries to enjoy,” Wang said.

    “The culture and historical genes of One Belt and One Road come from the old Silk Road, so it takes Eurasia as its main region,” he said, adding that representatives of 110 countries will attend.

    British Finance Minister Philip Hammond will come as May’s representative, while Germany and France are having elections at the time and will send high-level representatives, Wang said.

    Wang confirmed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte as among 28 leaders coming, along with the Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Serb and Polish prime ministers and Swiss and Czech presidents.

    “This is an economic cooperation forum, an international cooperation platform that everyone is paying attention to, supports and hopes to participate in,” he said.

    The forum will explore ways to address regional and global economic problems, generate fresh energy for interconnected development, and make the Belt and Road Initiative deliver greater benefits to the people of the countries involved, Xi said in a keynote speech at the Swiss ski resort of Davos in January.

    According to the Belt and Road Big Data Center of the State Information Center, China’s total value of trade with the Belt and Road economies was about US$953.59 billion in 2016, accounting for 25.7 percent of the total amount of China’s foreign trade.(SD-Xinhua)