"Upon his visit to Laos in November 2017, Xi Jinping wrote in an open letter, published in English and Lao in Laotian mainstream media, that “there is a high degree of complementarity between China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the strategy of Laos to transform itself from a landlocked to a land-linked country.” He further described the China-Laos Railway, the flagship of the BRI in Laos, as "(t)he transportation artillery that will drive the development of Laos (and that) is a dream coming true.” These lines point to two central features of China’s BRI. One is its embracing of the “Chinese Dream”, already extended as China’s “Asia-Pacific Dream”; the second is, more importantly, its discursive power of scripting China’s geopolitical and economic interests in the rhetoric of its partners’ national development strategies. As the land-linked strategy has been already advertised by the Laotian government for more than two decades, the BRI in Laos is, rather than breaking new ground, an intensified and accelerated continuation of already existing development strategies and policies..."