SUPPOSE YOU wanted to imagine a new world, or even a new world order. How, then, would you go about conjuring it up? You would do well to start with a name. Forget for a moment the significant problems of translating President Xi Jinping's grand project for an English-speaking audience. In Chinese it is called yi dai yi lu: literally, "one belt, one road". Such correlative, four-character phrases are common in Chinese, and imply balance, harmony, wholeness. Yi fu yi qi, or "one husband, one wife", is monogamy;yi xin yi yi, or "one heart, one soul" means wholeheartedly. As Eyck Freymann at Oxford University writes in a forthcoming book, "One Belt One Road", to a Chinese audience the phrase has a classical, even epic ring.
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