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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]