Over the past year, rates have fallen for container shipping from China (according to the Drewry World Container Index). Pricing has approached pre-crises levels. Will this trend be reflected in retail business, and what issues are transport operators concerned with? Retail.ru took these questions to key players on the market.

Against the prevailing narrative of the The Belt and Road as a top-down strategy to spread China’s geopolitical influence, there is the BRI’s impact through its first decade as emanating «from the middle out and bottom up» via transport-enabled corridors traversing a large number of regions within and across national territories.