Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Third World Quarterly on 20/02/2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046
Accepted author manuscript, 903 KB, PDF document
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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 - Understanding China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”
T2 - Beyond “Grand Strategy” to a State Transformation Analysis
AU - Jones, Lee
AU - Zeng, Jinghan
PY - 2019/8/1
Y1 - 2019/8/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - China
KW - Belt and Road Initiative
KW - investment
KW - governance
KW - state transformation
KW - grand strategy
U2 - 10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046
DO - 10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046
M3 - Journal article
VL - 40
SP - 1415
EP - 1439
JO - Third World Quarterly
JF - Third World Quarterly
SN - 0143-6597
IS - 8
ER -