China S Belt And Road Vision

This book examines the evolution and major elements of China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar project for the revival and refinement of ancient terrestrial and maritime trade routes. The author analyses the foreign policy and economic strategy behind the initiative as well as the geoeconomic and geopolitical impact on the region. Furthermore, he assesses whether the BRI has to be considered as a challenge to the US-led order, leading to a Sinocentric order in the 21st century. Offering two case studies on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR), the book reveals the drivers motivating China and its partners in executing BRI projects, such as security of commodity-shipments, energy supplies, and explores trade volumes as well as the anxiety these trigger among critics. The book juxtaposes these to non-Chinese, specifically multilateral institutional and Western corporate, inputs into Beijing’s developmental planning-processes. It also identifies the role of combined Chinese-foreign stimuli in generating the policy priorities precipitating the BRI vision, and the geoeconomic essence of BRI’s implementation.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), officially unveiled in 2013, is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign and economic policy initiative to achieve improved connectivity, regional cooperation, and economic development on a trans-continental scale. This book reviews the evolving BRI vision and offers a benefit-risk assessment of the BRI’s economic and geopolitical implications from the perspective of Asian stakeholder countries, using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Among the value added of the book is first an online perception survey of opinion leaders from Asian participating countries on various aspects of the initiative. To our best knowledge, the survey is the first of its kind. Second, the book presents the simulation results of a computable general equilibrium model of the world economy to estimate the potential macroeconomic impacts of the BRI as a whole and those of its constituent overland and maritime economic corridors. Third, the book makes ten key evidence-based policy recommendations on how to enhance the prospect of a successful and mutually beneficial BRI 2.0 to both China and stakeholder countries.

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 regionals 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 this volume 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 the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.

This book provides insights into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It offers critical perspectives from various directions, not excluding historical investigations, human geography approaches and neo-Marxist inclinations. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents one of the biggest geopolitical visions since the Cold War and offers the possibilities of an intercontinental vision of Aid politics, along with prospects for pan-Asianism. By and large, any geopolitical vision that purports to foster inter-regional dialogue and materialist development of peoples and economies is bound to have its flaws. The Belt and Road Initiative bears hallmarks of the socio-political tradition of Chinese authoritarian infrastructure politics while also offering a possible alternative to the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ of free markets, deregulation and a shift towards liberal democracy. Additionally, the Belt and Road Initiative opens up wide open intellectual spaces for dialogues between Asians, Arabs and Westerners on the meaning of inclusive inter-continental relationships in philosophy, geography and economics. The significance of this is often underplayed in Chinese official statements whereas this book introduces these possibilities within its assorted sections. “The book is about much more than the material aspects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, various chapter authors use the Belt and Road to look at perhaps the most fundamental issue of our times: how does one build a global world order and societies that are inclusive, cohesive and capable of managing interests of all stakeholders as well as political, cultural, ethnic and religious differences in ways that all are recognized without prejudice and/or discrimination?” —Prof. James Dorsey, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

This insightful book examines the growing role of China on the global stage by gauging the varying reactions of international spectators to Beijing's hugely significant Belt and Road Initiative. Featuring detailed studies of key geologistical projects, Peter Rimmer charts the swift transformation of China's domestic logistics systems into a global geologistics policy. Analyses of major international logistical projects, from the Great Stone Industrial Park of Belarus, through the ports of Gwadar, Piraeus, Darwin and Sabetta to the Nicaragua Canal, illustrate the global impact of China's geologistical developments and how key logistics skills are exported through the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. This book distils China's global logistics developments into three basic models - the transcontinental, the reverse and the classic - to reflect upon the effects of the first five years of the Belt and Road Initiative. Laced with detailed empirical studies and an array of illustrative maps, Rimmer assesses the domestic impact of the Initiative thus far and offers an astute appraisal of the imperial connotations of Beijing's global logistical project. This enlightening book provides crucial insights for academics and researchers in political science, transport studies and economics investigating China's recent policy initiatives, particularly those who examine the impact of geologistics. Policymakers and commentators will also benefit from the author's unique empirical insight into global logistics development.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s globe-girdling infrastructure and trade corridor project, is a rare watershed in international affairs. It affects, whether directly or indirectly, nearly the entire world, directly involving more than 60 countries, nearly 4.5 billion people (about two-thirds of the world’s population), up to $8 trillion, and around 40 per cent of the global economy. BRI also entails a rising power—perhaps the next superpower—endeavouring to build one of the biggest and most expensive super-projects the world has ever seen. If it achieves its potential, BRI could even pose a threat to the Bretton Woods global economic model that has prevailed since the end of World War II. BRI has the potential to change the world in a big way. And yet, the project also confronts security and financial challenges that are as serious as its potential is soaring. In this way, BRI is a topic that needs serious examination. This book features chapters on BRI prepared by top international scholars who have been tracking the project closely. The chapters assess the project’s impact across Asia, highlight its opportunities and challenges, and consider what might be in store in the future. The chapters in this book were first published as a special issue of the Asian Affairs.

In 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a campaign for national rejuvenation. The One Belt One Road initiative, or OBOR, has become the largest infrastructure program in history. Nearly every Chinese province, city, major business, bank, and university have been mobilized to serve it, spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas building ports and railroads, laying fiber cables, and launching satellites. Using a trove of Chinese sources, author Eyck Freymann argues these infrastructure projects are a sideshow. OBOR is primarily a campaign to restore an ancient model in which foreign emissaries paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, offering gifts in exchange for political patronage. Xi sees himself as a sort of modern-day emperor, determined to restore China’s past greatness. Many experts assume that Xi’s nakedly neo-imperial scheme couldn’t possibly work. Freymann shows how wrong they are. China isn’t preying on victims, Freymann argues. It’s attracting willing partners—including Western allies—from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf. Even in countries where OBOR megaprojects fail, Freymann finds that political leaders still want closer ties with China. Freymann tells the monumental story of Xi’s project on the global stage. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies from Malaysia to Greece, Russia to Iran, Freymann pulls back the veil of propaganda about OBOR, giving readers a page-turning world tour of the burgeoning Chinese empire, a guide for understanding China’s motives and tactics, and clear recommendations for how the West can compete.

This insightful book examines the growing role of China on the global stage by gauging the varying reactions of international spectators to Beijing’s hugely significant Belt and Road Initiative. Laced with detailed empirical studies and an array of illustrative maps, Peter Rimmer assesses the domestic impact of the Initiative thus far and offers an astute appraisal of the imperial connotations of Beijing’s global logistical project.