Rights statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Zeng, J. (2019), Narrating China's belt and road initiative. Glob Policy. doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12662 which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12662 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
Accepted author manuscript, 654 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Narrating China’s Belt and Road Initiative
AU - Zeng, Jinghan
N1 - This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Zeng, J. (2019), Narrating China's belt and road initiative. Glob Policy. doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12662 which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12662 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
PY - 2019/5/1
Y1 - 2019/5/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1111/1758-5899.12662
DO - 10.1111/1758-5899.12662
M3 - Journal article
VL - 10
SP - 207
EP - 216
JO - Global Policy
JF - Global Policy
SN - 1758-5880
IS - 2
ER -