June 30-When China's President, Xi Jinping, announced the Silk Road Economic Belt project in September 2013, it took the world by surprise. But it didn't come totally out of the blue. Anyone closely following events in the region would have known that there were a number of strands that had been coming together since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which converged in the concept so eloquently enunciated by President Xi in his speech at Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev University in September 2013. There, he presented his idea of the Silk Road Economic Belt, and then one month later, he announced the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. After the breakup of the Soviet Union there was a great deal of discussion-and urgency- about the need to develop independent transportation grids connecting the newly independent, but landlocked, Central Asian countries to Asia and to Europe. Chinese scholars who were tasked with issues of economic and social development in China, were already considering the possibility of extending transportation infrastructure to the central and western regions of China, which had been left out of the rapid development occurring in the coastal regions. This grid could then branch out into Central and South Asia. On September 12, 1990, the Northern Xinjiang Railway connected with the Tuxi Railway of the former USSR, marking the completion of the 11,000 kilometer New Euro-Asian Continental Bridge. Five years later, on September 8, 1995, railway experts from the seven countries concerned signed an agreement for opening the Alataw Pass-Druzhba international bridge. Internationally this perspective was already being proposed by the political forces in Europe and the United States around economist Lyndon LaRouche. With German reunification after 1989, LaRouche and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, proposed creating an integrated productive entity in the region formed by the triangle of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this "productive triangle" concept was expanded to encompass the land-locked Central Asian nations that had emerged from the Soviet Union. They and Russia would be integrated through the construction of several trunk lines of high-speed and other rail lines, which would stretch from Rotterdam to the Pacific Coast. These ideas were proposed to Chinese scholars by the Schiller Institute toward the beginning of the 1990s. All of these various strands came together in May 1996, in a major symposium held in Beijing under the auspices of China's Ministry of Science and Technology, titled International Symposium on Economic Development of the Regions along the Euro-Asia Continental Bridge.