Search

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]

The primary goal of this paper is to provide insight into the causes that led to the current U.S. – China trade war. It discusses the importance of the 'Belt and Road Initiative' and the 'Made in China 2025' programs to Beijing's realization of the 'Chinese dream', which refers to the avoidance of the middle-income trap and the accomplishment of the nation's great rejuvenation. This paper points out the leading roles played by the state-owned enterprises in the above two programs and reviews their destabilizing effects on the Chinese society. This paper also describes the measures taken by the U.S. to counter China's efforts to become the new superpower, thereby preserving its preeminent position in the world. In addition, the paper discusses the steps taken by Beijing to try to satisfy Washington's demand. The authors posit that the trade war is not, in fact, about trade but about technological dominance, and that both sides might fall into 'Thucydides's Trap,' the pattern of large-scale conflict when a rising power challenges a dominant one. According to the events that have transpired thus far, it appears our current trajectory is towards conflict and a cold war [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]