IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/smo/dpaper/019tg.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Political Economy of Connectivity: China s Belt and Road Initiative

Author

Listed:
  • Tolga Demiryol

    (Altinbas University, Istanbul, Turkey)

Abstract

There are ongoing academic and public debates on the nature of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While some observers hold that the BRI is primarily about economic development, others see it as a grand strategy of a great power with hegemonic aspirations. Is the BRI about development or geopolitics? This article adopts a political economy approach to bridge the developmental and geopolitical perspectives. The main argument is that the BRI signifies an attempt by the Chinese state to manage internal problems of capital accumulation by externalizing development on a trans-regional scale. The problems of capital accumulation under China’s export-oriented growth model indicates a particular form of spatial fix via the BRI, which goes beyond the exportation of excess industrial/financial capacity and seeks to transform external productive spaces through inter-regional connectivity. The process of constructing new nodes and infrastructures of capital creates space for new forms of asymmetric interdependencies, rendering it prohibitively costly for most BRI partners to exit China-centered networks. To the extent that such asymmetric dependencies can be leveraged for strategic purposes, the BRI serves a geopolitical as well as a developmental function.

Suggested Citation

  • Tolga Demiryol, 2019. "Political Economy of Connectivity: China s Belt and Road Initiative," Proceedings of the 13th International RAIS Conference, June 10-11, 2019 019TG, Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:smo:dpaper:019tg
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://rais.education/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/019TG.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Glawe, Linda & Wagner, Helmut, 2020. "China in the middle-income trap?," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    2. Michael Baltensperger & Uri Dadush, 2019. "The Belt and Road turns five," Russian Journal of Economics, ARPHA Platform, vol. 5(2), pages 136-153, July.
    3. Uri Dadush, 2019. "The Belt and Road turns five," Policy briefs 1900, Policy Center for the New South.
    4. Uri Dadush & Michael Baltensperger, 2019. "The Belt and Road turns five," Research papers & Policy papers 1901, Policy Center for the New South.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chaminda Abeysinghe & Hashan Wijesinghe, 2021. "Sino-Indian Rivalry and the contemporary significance of the Indian Ocean as a zone of peace in the Asian Century," Technium Social Sciences Journal, Technium Science, vol. 24(1), pages 594-614, October.
    2. Gandenberger, Carsten, 2018. "China's trajectory from production to innovation: Insights from the photovoltaics sector," Working Papers "Sustainability and Innovation" S03/2018, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI).
    3. Mingkai Liu & Changxin Liu & Xiaodong Pei & Shouting Zhang & Xun Ge & Hongyan Zhang & Yang Li, 2021. "Sustainable Risk Assessment of Resource Industry at Provincial Level in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-15, April.
    4. Glawe, Linda & Wagner, Helmut, 2017. "The Deep Determinants at More Subtle Stages of Development: The Example of the Middle-Income Trap Phenomenon," CEAMeS Discussion Paper Series 11/2017, University of Hagen, Center for East Asia Macro-economic Studies (CEAMeS), revised 2017.
    5. Wagner, Helmut, 2018. "Structural change, rebalancing, and the danger of a middle-income trap in China," BOFIT Policy Briefs 6/2018, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT).
    6. Michael Murach & Helmut Wagner, 2017. "How severe will the growth slowdown in China caused by the structural change be? An evaluation based on experiences from Japan and South Korea," Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(3), pages 269-287, July.
    7. Wagner, Helmut, 2017. "On the (non-)sustainability of China’s development strategies," CEAMeS Discussion Paper Series 6/2017, University of Hagen, Center for East Asia Macro-economic Studies (CEAMeS).
    8. Linda Glawe & Helmut Wagner, 2016. "The Middle-Income Trap: Definitions, Theories and Countries Concerned—A Literature Survey," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 58(4), pages 507-538, December.
    9. Kangchuan Su & Jiang Wu & Lulu Zhou & Hongji Chen & Qingyuan Yang, 2022. "The Functional Evolution and Dynamic Mechanism of Rural Homesteads under the Background of Socioeconomic Transition: An Empirical Study on Macro- and Microscales in China," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(8), pages 1-30, July.
    10. Murach, Michael & Wagner, Helmut, 2017. "How severe will the growth slowdown in China caused by the structural change be? – An evaluation based on experiences from Japan and South Korea," CEAMeS Discussion Paper Series 8/2017, University of Hagen, Center for East Asia Macro-economic Studies (CEAMeS).
    11. Murach, Michael & Wagner, Helmut & Kim, Jungsuk & Park, Donghyun, 2018. "Avoiding the middle-income trap: Korean lessons for China?," CEAMeS Discussion Paper Series 14/2018, University of Hagen, Center for East Asia Macro-economic Studies (CEAMeS).
    12. Glawe, Linda & Wagner, Helmut, 2017. "The Deep Determinants of the Middle-Income Trap," CEAMeS Discussion Paper Series 10/2017, University of Hagen, Center for East Asia Macro-economic Studies (CEAMeS), revised 2017.
    13. Zhaobin Fan & Hui Li, 2019. "International Migration, Human Capital Composition And Middle-Income Traps," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 64(04), pages 883-897, September.
    14. Wagner, Helmut, 2018. "Structural change, rebalancing, and the danger of a middle-income trap in China," CEAMeS Discussion Paper Series 13/2018, University of Hagen, Center for East Asia Macro-economic Studies (CEAMeS).
    15. Kerry Liu, 2018. "Chinese Manufacturing in the Shadow of the China–US Trade War," Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(3), pages 307-324, October.
    16. Bingqiang Li & Jing Yu & Lei Huang & Jinzhi Li & Changhan Luo, 2021. "Coupling Development of Manufacturing Promotion and Innovation in China," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(4), pages 21582440211, October.
    17. Yubin Huangfu & Haibo Yu & Zuoji Dong & Yingman Wang, 2024. "Research on the Risk Spillover among the Real Economy, Real Estate Market, and Financial System: Evidence from China," Land, MDPI, vol. 13(6), pages 1-26, June.
    18. Hu, Zhenhua & Song, Gaohui & Hu, Ziyue & Fang, Jiaqi, 2024. "An improved dynamic game analysis of farmers, enterprises and rural collective economic organizations based on idle land reuse policy," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    19. Fumitaka Furuoka & Kiew Ling Pui & Chinyere Ezeoke & Ray I. Jacob & Olaoluwa S. Yaya, 2024. "Growth Slowdowns And Middle-Income Trap: Evidence From New Unit Root Framework," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 69(01), pages 461-477, March.
    20. Fa Wang & Haifeng Wang & Joung Hyung Cho, 2022. "Consumer Preference for Yogurt Packaging Design Using Conjoint Analysis," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(6), pages 1-13, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:smo:dpaper:019tg. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eduard David (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://rais.education/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.