Djoomart Otorbaev, a distinguished professor at Beijing Normal University's Emerging Markets Institute and Tsinghua University's Schwarzman College, and a former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan / CHINA DAILY

With the same aim as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasian Economic Union was formed in 2015 as a purely economic union, which currently includes five countries. The EEU aims to break barriers to market access in the five member nations and further deepen economic cooperation within an integrated single market of 183 million people.

To meet the expectations of the leaders of China and Russia－who are the pioneers of the Belt and Road Initiative and the EEU respectively－the two initiatives should find ways to integrate, based on natural geographic peculiarities and complementary advantages. We need to meet each other more regularly to research how to harmonize the bilateral procedures that already exist between China and members of the EEU.

The Chinese leadership is persuasive and expectant in its commitment to the success of this initiative, and things will move in the right direction with financial and human resources, and knowledge.

Facing a large international community, China needs to learn how to do things in the right way given its long and rich, but mainly inward-oriented, history, and to accept its leadership role.

The initiative, linking China to Eurasia and Europe, is not at all only about infrastructure, but also about soft power and advancing the understanding of different people and countries along the two ancient trade routes. It's not a traditional bilateral system, but a truly regional, multinational, multilateral network and thus, it needs to be designed with precision.