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The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is poised to profoundly reshape the regional geographical landscape. While existing communication studies on BRI have focused on the official and media narratives to frame the initiative, the overall orientation of the topic in academic circles is not well understood. By conducting a bibliometric literature review, this paper addresses this gap by answering the research question: How is the BRI reflected in the academic literature? In the review, we divide all academic studies on BRI into four cohorts (studies from scholars based in China, in Quad countries, in the rest of the world, and cross-collaborating scholars) and use structural topic model to understand the themes and trends on BRI scholarship from scholars from these regions. Our results show that scholars in different cohorts understand BRI differently, specifically, with China-based scholars projecting ideas of development, growth and sustainability, while Quad-based scholars mostly focus on the geopolitical impact, security implications and debt sustainability of BRI. The findings also show a divergence between popular narratives on BRI and academic research on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises constitute ideal opportunities for authoritarian leaders to promote certain narratives, shaping reality in their favor and crafting their own preferred storylines about current events. In other words: they serve authoritarian leaders on a silver platter the opportunity to instrumentalize these unforeseen circumstances to gain domestic political legitimacy by promoting strategic narratives. The COVID-19 pandemic was no exception in this regard. Ever since its onset in early 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was among the most active actors worldwide seeking to capitalize on the global crisis for legitimation purposes. Whether applying narratives of governance supremacy, portraying the People's Republic of China as a "global savior," or promoting emotionally appealing nationalistic narratives, the regime used the pandemic as a window of opportunity to rebrand its international role and enhance its domestic legitimacy. When observing the CCP's communication style over the course of 24 pandemic months (2020–2022), however, major shifts become apparent regarding the main narratives crafted in communication with national audiences. Based on this, the paper focuses on the role of such narratives for legitimation claims. Using exemplary media articles collected between the outbreak of the pandemic in China in late 2019 until the harsh Shanghai lockdown in spring 2022, it thus traces the narratives employed by Chinese state elites and explores how they are intertwined with nationalism and broader power claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on multi-task principal–agent theories, we aim in this paper to explore a hitherto understudied politics–infrastructure nexus using a data set of Chinese municipal leader profiles. Analysing a panel dataset of 2,399 political leaders’ profiles and infrastructure-investment change across 283 Chinese cities from 2002 to 2016, we demonstrate that city leaders adopt an inverted U-shaped curve regarding infrastructure-investment growth over their tenures. The investment fluctuation strengthens in municipalities with a relatively lower degree of institutional development and in municipalities which have fewer political resources. Furthermore, a higher frequency of political turnover leads to a higher average growth rate of infrastructure investment. This study suggests that fluctuation in infrastructure investment in China is aligned with political incentives, offering new opportunities for comparative studies of global relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]