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Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: beyond ‘grand strategy’ to a state transformation analysis

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  • Lee Jones
  • Jinghan Zeng

Abstract

China’s massive ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa – is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down ‘grand strategy’, reflecting Beijing’s growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China’s foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, indeterminate scheme, driven primarily by competing domestic interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle for power and resources are already shaping BRI’s design and implementation. This will generate outcomes that often diverge from top leaders’ intentions and may even undermine key foreign policy goals.

Suggested Citation

  • Lee Jones & Jinghan Zeng, 2019. "Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: beyond ‘grand strategy’ to a state transformation analysis," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(8), pages 1415-1439, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:40:y:2019:i:8:p:1415-1439
    DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046
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    Cited by:

    1. Marcin Gornikiewicz & Jaroslaw Zelkowski, 2020. "Belt and Road Initiative in the Age of COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for the Development of the Strategic Project of the People’s Republic of China," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(Special 3), pages 302-310.

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