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More and more Chinese enterprises have participated in the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) since its launch in 2013. However, have they all actually benefited? Which companies otherwise have benefited most from the plan? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the impact of the BRI on Chinese enterprises. Among several findings, it reveals that the performance of companies remained low even though the initiative policy initially stimulated performance, the performance of enterprises depends on the geographical location of enterprises and that the returns of China's outward foreign direct investment in various industries became more volatile with only the mining industry enjoying better returns. Thus, the paper shows that the BRI offers Chinese enterprises opportunities but also brings challenges for companies to optimize the allocation of their resources and improve the performance of their investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A binary, geopolitical narrative of a new "Great Game" for power in Central Asia may be too simplistic. It remains unclear what regionalisation trends will become embedded in Central Asia, with the apparent rise of China. The paper examines potential for China's Belt and Road Initiative to build new Eurasian economic interdependence through connectivity infrastructure and to reduce dependency for some actors on Russia. A political risk and grounded theory approach is taken, utilising in-depth interviews with local experts and stakeholders to develop a risk/opportunity framework. Conclusions from the research indicate China is unlikely in the foreseeable future to replace Russia as regional hegemon, but is likely to drive greater economic integration. Empirical investigation of dynamics on the ground - including the spectrum of options available to actors - is recommended for realist understanding of economic and other international connectivity trends across Central Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

\nPlain Language SummaryThe Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has evolved from its ambitious beginning into a framework focused on high-quality development (HQD), emphasizing environmental sustainability and people-centered development. This study examines to what extent these new directives are implemented in the context of China’s overseas economic zones (OEZs), employing a multi-actor-influence model to analyze the complex interactions and challenges inherent in these projects. Focusing on the Vientiane Saysettha Development Zone (VSDZ) in Laos, our analysis identifies three primary institutional challenges: fragmentation between the central and local governments in China, structural constraints imposed on Chinese businesses, and inadequate cooperation between Chinese and host country actors. These challenges underscore the complexities of translating Beijing’s top-down policy into effective action on the ground. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of these findings for the BRI’s future development.This study examines Beijing’s recent strategic shift in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) towards high-quality development (HQD), focusing on sustainable environmental practices and enhancing local livelihoods. Our policy analysis confirms Beijing’s commitment to these goals. However, challenges arise due to the BRI’s decentralized implementation and the varied influences of multiple actors from both China and the host countries. We explore these challenges through a detailed case study of the Vientiane Saysettha Development Zone (VSDZ) in Laos, identifying three key issues: fragmentation between Chinese central and local governments, constraints on Chinese businesses, and inadequate cooperation between Chinese and host country actors.Our study contributes in three significant ways. First, it adds to the discussion of Beijing’s transition towards HQD and the BRI’s global influence through a review of Chinese policies and an analytical model elucidating the realities of BRI implementation. Second, it theorizes that outcomes of BRI projects are shaped more by local circumstances and stakeholder actions than by policies alone. Finally, it suggests potential measures to help realize HQD within the BRI framework in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a mega-project of primarily infrastructure-related loans and investments in Pakistan. Recently, the official discourse has increasingly shifted to the agricultural sector. For the region of Gilgit-Baltistan bordering China, academic and policy debates highlight the potential boost of fruit exports to China as the most promising opportunity to be leveraged through the CPEC. This paper scrutinizes these promises from a locally grounded perspective, investigating potential benefits and risks for local farmers. To make sense of the complex interplay between external and local actors, interests, markets and (infra)structures, the paper follows an assemblage-inspired approach to map out local trajectories. Contrary to the CPEC narrative, agricultural exports from Gilgit-Baltistan recently came to a halt, due to increasing trade barriers and seemingly competing agricultural developments in neighboring Xinjiang, China. Moreover, the economically most promising local crop for export to China, namely cherries, does not seem too promising for the majority of small farmers. There are other commodities with export potential, but overall, prospects appear to be limited. There is a need for a deeper engagement with the inherent complexities of CPEC trajectories, particularly in regards to local farming contexts in Pakistan and relevant developments in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The completion of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge marks not only a record-setting achievement in engineering, but also a materialisation of ongoing efforts by the People's Republic of China to engage in cooperative projects aimed at expanding and deepening integrative connections with the semi-autonomous Special Administrative Regions of Macau and Hong Kong. This paper explores the colonial and post-colonial social construction of Hong Kong as a political-economic island, and the implications this carries into the tensions and open conflicts that have unfolded under the One Country, Two Systems agreement. Using the bridge as a case, it critically examines the geopolitical and biopolitical dimensions of infrastructure as a practice of subnational (de)bordering. The case renders visible a contemporary moment where infrastructure occupies a central position at the conjuncture of technology, advanced governmentality and shifting geographies of sovereignty in the People's Republic of China, within subnational city-regional development plans, as well as internationally in projects, such as the geographically expansive Belt and Road Initiative. A close examination of the Bridge project highlights the constructed and contested nature of borders, as well as the complex identities and ideologies that define them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of China and the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative have intensified regional great power competition. Seemingly, China and Japan have been competing over the export of infrastructure projects and access to the Southeast Asian market. Against this backdrop, this paper sheds light on recipient states' agency. Specifically, this paper explores how Indonesia has responded to Sino-Japanese competition through the perspective of economic hedging. In the realm of domestic railway development and the need to establish connectivity on Java, why did the Indonesian government decide to work with China to develop the Jakarta-Bandung High-speed Rail project and Japan on the North Java Upgrading Line, as the two lines are not interoperable? Railway policy in Indonesia is strategic and pragmatic. On the one hand, Sino-Japanese competition diversifies Indonesia's options as it continues striving to strengthen infrastructure development. On the other hand, the need continually to strike a balance between the two great powers requires skill and flexibility. Therefore, maintaining policy autonomy and accepting economic costs make-up secondary states' responses to great power competition in turbulent times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has emerged as the largest public financier for energy infrastructure projects worldwide, concerns about the environmental and climate impacts of such projects have led to mounting international pressure on the Chinese government to 'green' its investment practices. This paper examines the understudied role of international engagement, and of specific international actors, in greening China's BRI. We propose two discrete models of engagement which serve as a means of understanding the role that international actors have played in greening China's BRI: (1) through direct engagement that influences individual project outcomes; and (2) through indirect engagement that shapes China's broader policies and investment practices. We also identify factors that have constrained the role of international influence, including the absence of an influential Chinese international development agency. Finally, we propose opportunities for international engagement with China regarding its overseas investment practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of international finance for coal power plants have intensified since the 2015 Paris climate agreement was negotiated. Over the past few years, Japan and South Korea have signaled their intent not to fund new coal projects overseas, leaving China and its Belt and Road Initiative as the 'financier of last resort.' In September 2021, China too announced its intent to stop providing finance for overseas coal projects. What accounts for their decision to cease financing overseas coal projects despite prominent differences in political systems, degree of internationalization of their financial systems, and economic size? Drawing on datasets of coal projects and financing supplemented by case material and interviews, this paper explores the dynamics of coal export finance and how the combination of international reputational pressures and declining demand for coal finance diminished the domestic support for incumbent coal exporters in all three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the energy mix of China's overseas electricity investments across Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) recipient countries. We focus on Indonesia and Pakistan. Our research is based on both newly gathered project-level data and in-depth interviews with stakeholders of Chinese-backed power plants in Indonesia and Pakistan. We examine (1) why Chinese actors are involved in renewable power generation in Pakistan and not in Indonesia, and (2) why Chinese-backed coal-fired projects in Pakistan are cleaner than in Indonesia. We argue that variations along the three dimensions – scope, governance regime, and issue linkage – lead to different energy mixes in Chinese-invested power plants across BRI countries. This framework specifies how supply and demand factors interact across multiple levels regarding the formulation and implementation of China's overseas electricity projects. Our findings shed new light on the environmental implications of BRI projects and the dynamics of renewable energy development in emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that Chinese involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean is primarily motivated by increasing the country's economic role within the region through Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The paper uses case study analysis methodology dwelling on the evolution and content of Chinese involvement in Greece and Cyprus. Primarily focusing of the nature of the Chinese investments in strategic sectors of the two cases in question the role that that China plays in Eastern Mediterranean is described as a 'silky involvement'. China's policy choices are also perceived to be an opportunity for Greece and Cyprus to combat the negative effects of 2007–2008 economic crises and to increase their geopolitical stronghold in the post-Cold War geopolitical environment of the Eastern Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations in the political and material fabric of cities and their host regions. We approach BRI-related infrastructural practice through three interconnected optics – discourse, instruments, and politics – so as to interrogate the articulation of projects linked to the BRI within the material site of the urban. Based on theorisations of infrastructure from an urban perspective and a critical review of literature on the BRI itself, we develop three illustrative case studies at different spatial scales and within different geographic contexts – in Pakistan, Central Europe and the UK. To examine the cases as well as their embeddedness in broader debates on the topic, we use a systematic review methodology relying on a wide variety of sources. We offer comparative and relational perspectives on the manner in which these relatively diverse cases demonstrate China's role as a global urban actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 5–10 years, a growing number of Chinese scholars and policy experts have sought to theorise the 'development' of other peoples and places in the Global South. These intellectual efforts include building temporal frameworks for describing development processes, and often, an implicit set of directives for effecting positive change. Drawing on eight months' fieldwork in Beijing, this paper examines the representational practices of depicting development and its temporal dimension that have been mobilised in the ongoing production of Chinese international development thinking. In particular, it is concerned with the ways in which temporal distance and proximity have been constructed to provide a theoretical and moral justification for China's intensifying geopolitical and economic preoccupations. We argue that more than a system of explanations, current Chinese thinking contains and expresses a recalibrated will to geopolitical power, which has had a conditioning effect on the enframing of the meanings and relations of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the recently rising number of academic papers that empirically examine local variances in China's Belt and Initiative (BRI) projects in various foreign lands, this paper points out the tension between attempts to theorize BRI projects. The Sino-localized approach and the assemblage theory were the two main attempts used by scholars from disparate academic disciplines to conceptualize local agency and to understand how local conditionalities, practices, and norms may affect the outcome of BRI projects. We need to examine their differences and similarities, and determine whether they are really irreconcilable. In addition, how their ontological differences lead to epistemological, methodological and analytical differences in studying BRI projects should be clarified as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has the factors that directly influence the transport and logistics. The relevant literature has been collected systematically since the BRI was initiated in 2013. We adopt a content analysis methodology involving a four-step process. It can be found that firstly, more and more papers on the BRI have been published these years and the influence of BRI on transport and logistics can be summarized into three main perspectives, namely, the changes of the politics & policy, the changes of the environmental dimensions, the direct influence on transport and logistics; secondly, the topics and adopted methodology have been summarized, and it can be found that the percentage papers using quantitative analysis increases over the years; thirdly, percentage of papers with optimistic attitude on the BRI has been increasing since 2013 and compared with authors with affiliations in China, authors with non-Chinese affiliations are more likely to show pessimistic attitudes; fourthly, the research gaps have been summarized, which illustrates future research direction or topics and can promote the studies on transport and logistics considering the influence of the BRI and provides theoretical basis for BRI's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comprises original research on China's use of bilateral media cooperation to mediate its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Building upon the literature on strategic narratives, aesthetic power and the Silk Road as a foreign policy concept, we present a detailed case study of the visual imagery of the "Silk Road" documentary collaboration between China's and Russia's state-owned international broadcasters, China Radio International and RT (formerly Russia Today). We employ a visual methodology to interrogate the formation and projection of multimodal (visual, textual and oral) narratives about China's infrastructural activities along this metaphorical new "Silk Road". We examine how the Silk Road series gives sense to China's BRI, the relative weighting of Chinese and Russian strategic narratives about the BRI, and how power is distributed in this Chinese-Russian media partnership. Our analysis reveals that in re-packaging visual imagery that applies nostalgia to the history of core places and technologizes their future, the series projects a pre-curated Chinese visual narrative that emplots the BRI as human and cultural development. Russian regional strategic narratives are marginalized. China is applying its aesthetic power to Russian journalists and politicians; RT obtains some commercial benefits, but the Russian state's aesthetic power is ceded to China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese mammoth investment projects abroad, and especially those under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) umbrella, are receiving heavy scrutiny in academic and policy circles. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence to evaluate their impact. This paper employs a difference- in-differences approach and a pair of new datasets on government spending and economic activity compiled by the World Bank to examine the local impacts of the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor in Pakistan. It finds that the 2013 announcement of CPEC was accompanied by a disproportionate increase in government spending in CPEC districts. However, in the six years after it was first announced, CPEC has not directly contributed a significant increase in economic activity in the districts along its path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Tea Road (Wanli chadao) is a 13,000 km trade route that for two centuries connected Qing China and Tsarist Russia. It has been identified in recent years as an important category of China's route heritage. The rediscovery of the Great Tea Road, and other Chinese route heritage, is being framed in a 'mobility narrative', that is, a narrative that describes how mobility and exchange over space and time contribute to the formation of the Chinese nation or Zhonghua minzu. Since 2013 the Great Tea Road has been incorporated into the 'authorised mobility narrative' of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and in particular to the BRI agreement linking China, Mongolia and Russia. In 2019 the Great Tea Road was placed on the China list for World Heritage application. This paper examines the rise of the Great Tea Road in contemporary China and describes the various actors that play a formative role in developing the narratives and policies associated with such route heritage. It finds that the Chinese combination of 'mobility narrative' and 'heritage bureaucracy' provides a discursive and institutional frame that is able to mobilise significant resources in the pursuit of cultural policy and heritage diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps out contemporary discourses of Chinese diplomacy that have proliferated under the aegis of 'major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics'. We examine how these narratives are underpinned by webs of relationality that see China promoting equal and win–win partnerships with other state actors, yet are also defined by hierarchical premises for such diplomatic engagements. These relational contradictions are most clearly manifested when we interrogate the spatial dynamics of China's diplomatic endeavours through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). By scrutinising the geopolitical imaginations, sites and scales associated with the BRI, we turn attention to three spatial tensions that are closely bounded up with the relational contradictions of Chinese diplomacy: 'win–win' diplomacy promoting a 'harmonious world' versus territorially based diplomacy; periphery diplomacy versus the global ambitions of BRI; and the centralisation versus decentralisation dimensions of Chinese diplomacy. This allows us to make sense of the multiplicity of descriptors that have been affixed to Chinese diplomacy, in order to underscore the 'work' they perform to bequeath (at times, divergent and contested) meanings to China's new foreign policy approach. Hence, a relational and spatial understanding of Chinese diplomacy, we argue, can reveal a more nuanced picture of the promises, potential and disjunctures of China's rapidly expanding geopolitical and diplomatic actions on the international stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) intersect and overlap in Central Asia at the heart of Eurasia. Whereas the literature has commonly focused on the economic aspects of these major regional policy initiatives, efforts to create a common Eurasian higher education space through these regionalisms have barely been studied. In response, this paper compares the development of Russian and Chinese led visions for Eurasian higher education regionalism in Central Asia and the extent to which these constructions overlap. The paper also sheds lights on the perspectives of Central Asian states by investigating how these countries are approaching these efforts to construct a Eurasian higher education region. The conceptual framework brings together higher education regionalism with overlapping regionalism and takes a policy-oriented methodological approach. The paper introduces the new term of "points of correspondence" based on language used in both Russian and Chinese policy discourse to explain how constructions of a Eurasian higher education region can overlap without duplicating or flowing into each other. "Points of correspondence" emphasizes neither competition nor collaboration but rather the ongoing pursuit to find ideas and policy tools that best fit one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Mongolia's attempts at balancing its relations with China and Russia and the dilemmas it faces as China's influence grows in the wake of its "Belt and Road Initiative". Mongolia has embraced China's connectivity projects and a new form of trilateralism, even though Mongolia was not included in the initial five economic corridors proposed by Xi Jinping in 2013. Mongolian concerns over geo-strategic isolation led to a renewed effort to embrace its two big neighbors, resulting in the proposal of the trilateral "Economic Corridor" in 2016, followed by further trilateral summits. The paper thus seeks to answer the puzzle how Mongolia's self-perception as a geopolitical bridgehead state can be reconciled with the partially diverging interests of its two neighbors. Drawing on interviews with Mongolian experts and officials as well as qualitative document analysis, the paper adds empirical nuance to the debate about Sino-Russian interaction in Eurasia, but also to the understudied dimension of the agency of the "in-between countries" in their shared neighborhood. It argues that the spectrum ranging from competition to accommodation between China and Russia is further complicated by the choices and policy responses of actors "in between", like Mongolia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines China's Belt and Road Initiative as an exercise in geocultural power. To date, Belt and Road has been analysed as a geopolitical and geo-economic initiative, with arguments constructed around the development of infrastructure, trade or finance agreements. This paper introduces the Silk Roads as one of the most compelling geocultural concepts of the modern era to show its strategic value as a platform for cooperation and multi-sector connectivity. A critical analysis of the Silk Roads provides new insights into Belt and Road, revealing how China is mobilising its geocultural potential as a civilisational state to build regional and continental connectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional powers have growing concerns about China's influence in the Global South derived from its fast-growing outreach in the past two decades. However, how stakeholders in developing countries perceive China's engagement and influence remains largely unknown. Drawing upon a survey of 210 participants and 30 follow-up interviews in the Pacific region with a focus on Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Tonga, this paper examines Pacific civil society stakeholders' perceptions about China. It suggests that these perceptions are nuanced at best and reveals concerns about the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese foreign aid and China-Pacific relations. It argues that China's influence on Pacific civil society is weak, but this may be different in the political, government and business sectors. More similar research is required to develop a comprehensive understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project in Myanmar, this paper contests the proposition that China's state-coordinated investments are, by nature, more accommodating to local people's demands than Western investments. Tension between Myanmar villagers and the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) in a copper mine project does not square with Beijing's "inclusive globalization" narrative. Drawing upon extensive semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in a Sino-Myanmar copper mine project, as well as other secondary data, this study finds that the Chinese SOE's operation was reactive to the ebb and flow of social resistance and the government's pressure amid the host country's democratization in the 2010s. Reforms were more likely to occur when the Chinese SOE observed more domestic constraints in its operation environment. It showed less incentive to improve its business practices when societal actors failed to display strong resistance, and the host government did not care about its legitimacy. Despite Beijing's efforts to craft an image of itself as a responsible power, conflicts in the BRI project should not be simplified as the SOE's defiance of the state's regulations. They are rooted in the state-centric foreign policy that systematically overlooks societal actors in state-coordinated investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With China's continuous rise and growing external commercial, strategic, and political endeavours, questions have arisen about the motivation, timing, and locale of China's outreaching strategies. This research analyzes China's overseas port investments through a comparative study of Greece and Pakistan, two important partners of China's Belt and Road Initiative. Adopting the neoclassical realist framework and drawing on expert interviews, official statistics, and policy documents, this paper reveals how China's economic security objectives in combination with changing geopolitical structures led to its external port investments. This research contributes to the studies on rising powers and geopolitics by showing how China as a rising power capitalizes on geopolitical opportunities created by the changing interests of dominant powers to expand its presence in strategically important regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's outward FDI reached a peak in 2016, making it as important a foreign investor as Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In this paper, we investigate the main motivations behind Chinese investments in developing countries, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in particular. Although the size of Chinese investment in CEE is small, the region is strategic for China as it is a gateway into Western Europe under the Belt Road Initiative. As new or future members of the EU, the CEE countries also provide access to the single market. We find that the motivations to invest in developing countries differ according to regions. Based on outward FDI data provided by the Chinese authorities, the number of Chinese FDI greenfield and M&A projects from Financial Times and Zephyr respectively, as well as face-to-face interviews with companies with investments in CEE, we find that for the case of CEE, domestic markets, access to the larger EU market, strategic assets like technology and prior relationship with the CEE are main reasons for investing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) initiated by China involves the construction of a new form of regional economic cooperation between China and the associated countries. Priority is given to eliminating maritime bottlenecks and improving maritime connectivity in the shipping network along the MSR. However, such potential bottlenecks have rarely been quantitatively identified. In this paper, we present a recursive spectral bi-partitioning method to detect the bottlenecks in the container shipping network along the MSR. This method identifies the bottlenecks by locating the cuts with the least total link frequency, normalised by the size of the port communities on either side of the cut. The results of the case study show that the proposed method performs well. Four bottlenecks with strategic geographical positions along the key trade lanes are found, namely: Suez Canal, Cape of Good Hope, northern Oceania, and the South China Sea, indicating locations in need of connectivity improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geopolitics plays a decisive role in the international politics. The importance of geopolitics can be seen in the Twentieth century that culminated in the First Word War. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway Project was the true manifestation of geopolitics, while the Balkan region played a significant role due to its geopolitical and geo-strategic importance. The Balkans being at the crossroads of great powers became a catalyst for animosity among them. Geopolitics has again taken a centre stage in the Twenty-first century due to China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its flagship project i.e., China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The paper intends to investigate, analyse, and predict the BRI's flagship belt i.e., CPEC and its likely impacts on the existing rivalry between China and the United States under the prism of Neo-Realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]