This month marks the fifth anniversary of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initially announced as the New Silk Road Economic Belt in September 2013. As China celebrated the BRI at a special forum on August 27th, and wooed its African partners at the 2018 Beijing Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) days later, economic ministers of the members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which includes China, India, and Japan, met in Singapore to iron out details before its planned launch by the end of this year. In this RPI Policy Alert, we catch up on the recent developments in the Rising Powers’ efforts to improve connectivity and trade in the Indo-Pacific ahead of our panel “The Indo-Pacific and Regional Trends: Towards Connectivity or Conflict?” later this month.  Read more here.