BELT AND ROAD IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN

THE INDIAN OCEAN FROM ADMIRAL ZHENG HE TO HUB AND SPOKE CONTAINER MARITIME COMMERCE

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan Eve

TO BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE, An Update (January 2020)

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Our final and main objective was, in 2016, to consider the emergence of the Indian Ocean as the center of 21st-century maritime container commerce with Sri Lanka as the hub and Africa becoming an essential vector.

We concentrated on the modern period, the macro-geographic data and situations in and around the Indian Ocean and on one particular aspect: the development of the hub-and-spoke model for the network of maritime connections in, around and beyond the Indian Ocean as for container commerce. We were writing after the end of the Tamil Tigers terroristic civil war in Sri Lankan, hence in 2010 and subsequent years. Mahinda Rajapaksa was President and Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the minister who led the final military offensive and won the war.

We insisted on the hub itself, Sri Lanka, which was at the time changing rapidly; on some of the various harbors around the Indian Ocean and their inland goods transportation networks, essentially…