Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative (original) (raw)

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.

China's Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground

Political Geography, 2020

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US $1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process-a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macroeconomic , and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.

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.

China's Belt and Road initiative Building a megaregion or pursuing lateral politico-economic goals

This paper undertakes a forthright appraisal of the likelihood for the B&R initiative to reach its core objectives. It departs from the observation that the most central of these objectives has not been stated explicitly in official documents nor has been acknowledged in speeches and statements by Chinese leaders and yet articulates most of the official, explicitly stated ones, i.e., to drive the formation of an economically integrated region comprising the countries earmarked by Beijing as the objects of the initiative’s myriad programs, projects and campaigns. It contends that it is unlikely that this overarching objective can be attained in the foreseeable future, so what the Chinese leadership is intending is to fulfill the several implicit goals that lie undeclared in the interstices and sidelines of official documents and speeches and statements of president Xi and his top collaborators; whatever progress is made toward the construction of such an integrated B&R region will be a most welcome by-product. This paper substantiates these claims.

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.

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.

China's Economic Statecraft: The Role of the Belt and Road Initiative

European Research Studies Journal, 2021

Purpose: The research aims to examine China's economic activities around the world from the broad perspective of the country's economic security. The authors begin with explaining the concept of economic statecraft and then deal with the analysis of the Chinese overseas economic expansion. Design/Methodology/Approach: The main tools used to achieve the objectives mentioned above include a literature analysis, logical reasoning and statistical research. Findings: The last decades have revealed a new pattern in global economic cooperation. The Belt and Road Initiative turned out to be a successful instrument supporting China's economic growth and deepening international economic cooperation and interdependence. The BRI project allows China not only to secure access to supplies and markets but also strengthen its soft power and gives the possibility to build a powerful network of interconnected countries, independent from the Western powers, willingly cooperating with China in every field. Practical Implications: The research results are helpful to realise the extend and importance of the Belt and Road Initiative in China's economic statecraft and indicate potential fields for future international cooperation under the BRI. As close economic cooperation under the BRI can have significant consequences for China and all countries covered by this project, all partners have to be aware of the complexity of their involvement in this initiative and the pros and cons of such interdependence. Originality/Value: The Belt and Road Initiative is a novel form of broad international cooperation. Thus it deserves special attention and research. The research concerns an economic dimension of the Belt and Road Initiative and provides a comprehensive analysis of China's worldwide economic expansion.

China's Economic Power in Asia: The Belt and Road Initiative and the Local Guangxi Government's Role

Asian Perspective, 2019

China's growing economic power has been identified as a major factor in generating profound transformations of the strategic landscape in Asia. Beijing's interest in using its economic power for the pursuit of geopolitical objectives remain strong. Many analysts believe that the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents the continuation and even intensification of such Chinese policy. I attempt to unpack China's economy power in its external relations by focusing on the role that Guangxi, a subnational government in China, has played by facilitating the emergence of the BRI and by actively participating in the implementation of the initiative. My study suggests that in-depth knowledge about local governments' activism in socioeconomic engagements with neighboring countries contributes significantly to a more nuanced understanding of China's power, particularly its economic power in Asia.