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In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, China grew much faster than India despite having a shorter railway network. According to the World Bank, in 1996 China had 56,678 km of rail lines, and India had 62,915km. The China-Pakistan Friendship Highway is a crown jewel of China's Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure programme to connect Chinese companies to new markets around the world.
According to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, private firms accounted for only 28 per cent of BRI investments in the first half of 2018 , down by 12 percentage points from the same period of 2017. Moreover, Western firms, an important component of China’s private sector, are retreating from the country. Several US companies, including Amazon, Oracle, Seagate, and Uber – as well as South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, and Toshiba, Mitsubishi, and Sony from Japan – have either scaled down their China operations or decided to leave altogether.