Will Belt and Road enable China to build new world order?

Last weekend in Beijing, President Xi Jinping hosted the first-ever international conference on the Belt and Road initiative, by which China seeks to establish a huge economic bloc.
The initiative aims to link Asia to Europe by reviving the ancient Silk Road trade routes, improving infrastructure and vitalising regional trade.
The conference was attended by 1,500 delegates from more than 130 nations. Twenty-nine countries, including Russia, Italy and the Philippines, sent top leaders to the meeting.
Xi is depending on the success of the meet to reinforce his authority ahead of this autumn’s Chinese Communist Party conference.
As such, he announced a further US$1.64-trillion injection for the Silk Road Fund, to cover infrastructure construction along the route.
In his opening address, he also underscored the need to “uphold the multilateral trading regime and advance the building of free-trade areas”. China would “foster a new type of international relations” based on mutual cooperation, coexistence and co-prosperity, he added. The speech laid out Beijing’s grand plan to challenge the existing order centred on the United States, which under new President Donald Trump has withdrawn form the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact. 
However, Xi’s assertion that China will lead free trade in place of the United States is not persuasive:
Beijing restricts foreign corporations’ activities in China. Meanwhile it exports large amounts of low-priced steel products produced in excess. 
 Meanwhile its grand vision for Silk Road infrastructure has suffered delays in a conspicuous number of projects due to high-handed methods and over-optimistic estimates. This is typified by the stalled plan for Indonesia’s high-speed railway.
The problem is that the maritime Silk Road scheme is inseparably linked to China’s efforts to secure footholds for its navy through harbour-improvement projects.
Progress is being made on large-scale harbour projects in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, both with access to the Indian Ocean. Although China emphasises the potential economic benefits here, there is no doubt that the harbour projects are supporting Beijing’s hegemonic maritime push aimed at excluding US influence from the region.
In Djibouti, northeastern Africa, a naval supply base is under China-funded construction. This risks arousing anxiety among nearby nations such as India, who are already rattled by Beijing’s construction and militarisation of artificial islands in the South China Sea. By continuing with such forceful moves, the Xi administration is endangering prospects for the Belt and Road initiative’s success.
Japan sent such figures as Toshihiro Nikai, secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, to the last weekend’s conference. It is important to carefully determine whether his visit will contribute to the Asian region’s stability and development, not to mention the Japan-China relationship.