China's Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground (original) (raw)
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Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative
2021
The year 2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regional networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative: Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate...
China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Global Politics and Implications
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a global infrastructure development project that ambitiously aims to connect Asia with European and African continents through land and sea corridors. China adopted this gigantic game-changing master plan in 2013 and spurred much speculation among scholars and policymakers worldwide. This article investigates the development of the project through the lens of global political geography and economy. From an international relations perspective, the author consults relevant pieces of literature and focuses on the international issues and events concerning the development of the project using concepts of ideas, interests, and institutions within the scope of geopolitics and political economy. The analysis is performed by reviewing critical events and arguments related to the ideas, interests and institutions evolving around the implementation of BRI. Drawing from the analysis, the author argues that the rise of China as a dominant global superpower largely depends on the success of the BRI, and this initiative will continue to generate politics among the international actors, multinational entities, and institutions. Despite widespread speculations, the project poses a substantive threat to the USA's global dominance and is likely to create more global development cooperation under Chinese leadership and vision.
China's Belt and Road Initiative: at the crossroads of challenges and ambitions
Pacific Review, 2018
Interpretations of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mostly agree that it is a policy opening that offers some remedies for China's economic and security challenges, as well as reflects China's increasing regional and global ambitions. This paper argues that the multiple drivers characterizing the BRI result from the multiple identities of China as a developing country struggling with several sources of instability and macroeconomic problems and, simultaneously, a regional and an emerging power, and finally a major global power with the significant economic capacity to shape the global economic order. The paper aims to substantiate the entanglement of the defensive and ambitious motivations behind the BRI by examining the background against which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership has suggested it. In so doing, it draws on Chinese official policy documents and statistics, speeches from Chinese leaders, and existing social-scientific research on the transformation of China's economic and political landscape in recent years.
Narrating China's belt and road initiative
Global Policy, 2019
This article studies the formation process of China's belt and road initiative (BRI)-the most important Chinese foreign policy initiative under Xi Jinping. It argues that the BRI was put forward as a broad policy idea that was subsequently developed with relatively concrete content. During this process, the shifting international landscapes have gradually driven the BRI from a periphery strategy into a global initiative. By examining the case of Jiangsu Province, this article also shows how Chinese local governments have actively deployed their preferred narratives to influence and (re-)interpret the BRI guidelines of the central government in order to advance their own interests. As a result, this produces a variety of competing, ambiguous and contradictory policy narratives of the BRI within China, which undermines the Chinese central government's monopoly on the BRI narratives. This leaves the BRI as a very vague and broad policy slogan that is subject to change and open to interpretation. In this regard, the existing analyses-that consider the BRI as Beijing's masterplan to achieve its geopolitical goals-pay insufficient attention to the BRI's domestic contestation and overstate the BRI's geopolitical implications.
The Regional Impacts of China's Belt and Road Initiative
Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 2020
In order to frame the analysis of the BRI’s regional implementation, this special issue draws on Freeman’s (2018) conception of China’s “regionalism foreign policy” and Zhou and Esteban (2018) “regional multi-lateral cooperation.” Freeman interprets the BRI as a “comprehensive approach to regional security whereby it seeks to engage [a] region through multiple vectors […] as part of an overarching security strategy to advance China’s power and influence” (Freeman, 2018: 92). Similarly, Zhou and Esteban (2018: 488) see China’s focus on regions via the BRI as a multifaceted grand strategy […] promoting China’s soft power and building its role as a normative power through the promotion of alternative ideas and norms, and reshaping global governance in a way that reflects China’s values, interests and status. They point to the need to eclectically combine theoretical insights from realism, liberalism, and constructivism to analyse the complex material, ideational, and institutional factors that have are being generated by the emerging BRI (cf. Tang, 2013). This issue follows their lead in understanding that it is not possible to encompass China’s multi-faceted approach to the BRI using only one theoretical or methodological approach; it is instead necessary to take an eclectic approach, which at the same time sets out to frame the initiative in a coherent, integrated fashion as far as possible.
Assembling China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Discourse, Institution, and Materials
International Political Sociology, 2024
The article uses the concept of assemblage to analyze the becoming, not being, of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), that is, the ways in which different elements were framed and constructed so as to constitute the BRI, often seen as China’s “grand” or “global” strategy. Different from rational and more-than-rational perspectives, the assemblage approach pays attention to the role of materials as well as the contingencies that were associated with the BRI. Thus, the article argues that the global BRI is best conceptualized as an assemblage that emerged through (de)territorializing processes in which various practices, institutions, discourses, and materials came together to form different relations with specific effects, rather than a set of principles simply conceived and imposed by China’s central government. The Chinese governmental institutions and national discourses are critical to its emergence, but so are materials such as the forms of policy papers and infrastructure. Seeing it this way allows us to understand how such a broad and heterogenous strategy as the BRI is held together without ceasing to be heterogenous; in other words, how the BRI emerges, travels, and mutates.
Belt and Road Initiatives (BRIs): Understanding China’s Intentions Behind It
European Journal of Law and Political Science
BRI is regarded as the most aspiring foreign and economic policy initiative of President Xi’s legacy. At the same time, Beijing has the overarching objective to achieve its geopolitical goals by economically binding China’s neighbouring countries through this initiative. Some Scholars are cynical regarding the success of BRI as planned by President Xi’s administration, urging caution for both China and the countries involved. President Xi’s exceptional overt emphasis on protecting China’s national interests that transpired into their newly formed foreign policy approaches has demonstrated that China’s commitment to peaceful development is not without conditions. China’s commitment to a peaceful rise will also be further conditioned by the many externalities, namely international and regional interest, domestic priorities, security dilemmas, power conflict, and conflicting core national interests from participating members, which in turn can be reciprocated with antagonistic strategi...
China’s belt and road initiative: Changing the rules of globalization
Journal of International Business Studies, 2019
China's international strategy can be described as 'State driven' rather than 'State controlled'. It combines a number of elements-"top down" investment from the State via State owned companies and sovereign wealth funds, "bottom up" investment by companies, both public and private, often utilising external acquisition of key foreign assets including technology, brands, skills and market access, network influence, and umbrella macro strategies such as 'One Belt, One Road'. This complexity-and the variety of actors involved-is a challenge for theory.
Third World Quarterly, 2022
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese state/capitalist programme of transnational infrastructure construction initiated in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, Chinese banks extended hundreds of billions of dollars –principally across Asia, but also Europe and Africa – for transportation and energy networks. Recently released statistics, however, suggest that project lending for the BRI collapsed from 2016 onwards. Our paper examines the reasons for this contraction through a case-study of the BRI in Africa. We contend that the lending contraction resulted from political and economic contradictions generated by this form of international interconnection, including the types of debt traps it helped create. This outcome is explained partly by the fact that the BRI is simultaneously a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. Whereas the balance of economic risks is arguably skewed against borrowers (in some cases leading to debt traps), from a geopolitical perspective, the Chinese state also seeks to expand influence in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. This creates counter- pressure on further expansion of such financing, which, complemented by domestic economic implications of loan failure, helps to explain the contraction.