Magdy Amer, Egyptian Ambassador to China

Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping made the proposal of building the "Silk Road Economic Belt" and the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road" (also known as "One Belt and One Road"). As a very important country along the ancient Silk Road, how can Egypt benefit from this initiative and what challenges is it still facing? Magdy Amer, Egyptian Ambassador to China shared his opinions in an interview with People’s Daily Online recently.

People’s Daily Online: What’s your understanding of President Xi Jinping’s proposal of building the "Silk Road Economic Belt" and the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road"?

Magdy Amer: The target of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s initiative is to achieve development and to enhance a better harmonization among the countries along the “One Belt and One Road”.

Egypt welcomes the initiative from the beginning. At the sixth ministerial conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF) held in June 2014 in Beijing, the whole forum welcomed the initiative. So actually 22 Arab countries including Egypt welcomed the initiative. It’s an opportunity for the development of the whole area which includes part of Asia, Middle East and Europe.

People’s Daily Online: What are the opportunities and the challenges Egypt is now facing in the development of "One Belt and One Road"?

Magdy Amer: We have just received an idea from the Chinese side. Now we need to examine it in depth and think how to achieve this. We see that as an opportunity and a challenge at the same time.

It is an opportunity because Egypt and other countries all agree with the principles of this initiative. So this is a good opportunity. But it’s a challenge as well because it’s a multi-dimensional initiative. It has an economic dimension, cultural dimension and people-to-people dimension, scientific dimension, etc. How can we implement it? We need an in-depth discussion about this initiative. Actually Egypt believes that there should be some meetings here in China to combine all the countries to discuss the idea and how to implement it.

Then if you go deeper and deeper you can find so many details. If you have a railway between China and those countries or a maritime line, how can we control them? It needs very detailed harmonization. We need to agree on everything. The idea is very fascinating, but we need to go deeply into the issue.

During the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum many Arab countries actually mentioned that we need from the Chinese side more elaboration on that issue. Some countries offered to have a gas pipeline between these countries. That’s a very good idea, but how can we implement it?