The People’s Republic of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched in 2013 and has officially involved 140 countries as of 2021. This paper reviews a total of 11 Chinese policies that can be considered part of the efforts to the ‘greening’ of the Belt and Road. It analyses how, among the wide variety of principles, targets and tasks to ‘green’ the BRI, the connotation of ‘green’ has evolved over time. In particular, priority has transitioned from ecological and environmental protection and pollution control in the early days of the BRI to climate change and conservation of biodiversity since 2020. The chapter shows a progression towards more concrete greening Belt and Road implementation measures, including guidance for key industries, life-cycle management of projects, and stopping building new coal-fired power stations since decarbonisation became a domestic policy priority in 2020.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brought to greater prominence a question that has long vexed Australian foreign policy-makers: could they avoid choosing between the US security alliance and Australia’s complementary economic ties with China? Given the immense political capital invested in the BRI by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it was perhaps inevitable that Australia – like many other countries – had to declare its position. By so doing, however, Australia was forced to reckon with an issue that pitted its security interests directly against its economic ones. This chapter traces Australia’s evolving position on the BRI from 2016 to 2020, its interrelated justifications for rejecting the BRI, and the political and economic consequences of the decision. We show that debate over the BRI disrupted a longstanding consensus about the centrality of free trade and investment to Australian foreign economic policy. The BRI, we argue, signified a turning away from Australia’s previously enthusiastic support for global free trade to a more qualified security-sensitive approach.

This chapter first gives an overview of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including its background and content. It then examines how major Western powers are responding to the BRI by proposing alternatives, thus illustrating its geopolitical and geo-economic implications. Following this, it deconstructs the legal framework of the BRI and explains the approach with which China is putting the BRI into practice. Finally, it explores what the BRI may bring about in the international legal order and the Chinese legal order. Through the prism of the BRI, this chapter will help appreciation of how China, as it becomes a leading state, exerts influence on the international order, which is experiencing a tremendous transformation.

China and the United States are in a race to dominate the global minerals market in order to lead in clean-tech manufacturing while protecting the technologies needed by the military and other national security imperatives.

The key question this chapter addresses is which countries are the most receptive to Chinese foreign infrastructure spending? I theorize electoral autocracies will be the most avid recipients. This chapter analyzes Chinese foreign spending since the introduction of the BRI at the end of 2013 with data from the China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT) dataset. Multivariate tests indicate electoral autocracies are the major recipients during the BRI timeframe, from 2014 to 2019. Extending the timeframe to 2005 to 2019, the findings indicate a substantive difference in the relationship between Chinese foreign construction spending and electoral autocracies that occurs with the initiation of the BRI. Logistics performance indicators also show electoral autocracies display the greatest improvement from before to after the introduction of the BRI. While the share of Chinese exports flowing to electoral autocracies increases during the BRI time period, it is not possible to conclude this is a deviation from previous trends; more time is needed to establish confidence for these effects. The main takeaway is the exceptional role electoral autocracies play in attracting Chinese foreign spending in the context of the BRI, especially when the leaders have an insecure hold on power.

To explain what drives the demand for Chinese infrastructure spending and the adoption of its digital standards among low- and middle-income countries, we must begin by considering how they effectively address market failures. A first set of market failures regards impediments to private investment for building infrastructure. Western multilateral development banks such as the World Bank commonly impose liberalizing conditionalities on recipient states. These can be politically problematic for rulers of autocratic countries that rely on state controls to retain their hold on power. China, by contrast, has an explicit policy of noninterference in the domestic politics of foreign nations. China’s own political motivations coupled with huge dollar reserves have enabled it to effectively address the market failures of autocracies in a politically palatable way. A second type of market failure regards transaction costs and coordination failures. These can be addressed via the adoption of digital technologies. China can leverage its preferential access to autocracies for infrastructure spending in order to promote the adoption of its digital and related technical standards.

The puzzle of this chapter is whether characteristics of BRI projects display patterns corresponding to a host country’s political regime. The prevailing counterargument is that BRI projects reflect primarily what China wants. The evidence presented in this chapter is based on a different dataset from the prior chapter and includes over 2,100 projects up through 2019 across 127 countries. For each project, ten characteristics were manually coded. The findings both corroborate the importance of electoral autocracies and also provide more detailed evidence for systematic differences in the structure of BRI projects depending on the political regime in which they are located. The analysis demonstrates clear and significant patterns between BRI project characteristics and political regimes as well as for strong versus weak electoral autocrats that are consistent with and extend the findings of the previous chapter.

In 2013, Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Maritime Silk Road Initiative while visiting Indonesia. However, Malaysia became a far more avid recipient of Chinese spending in the years afterward. What can account for this surprising outcome? In this opening chapter, Richard Carney explains that we should care about the answer to this puzzle because it can help us understand how China can acquire global influence by addressing developing countries’ enormous unmet demand for infrastructure and spread the adoption of its digital standards. In contrast to existing explanations that focus on the demand for foreign investment by private firms, Carney proposes a novel explanation for why demand for Chinese SOE-led investment varies across countries. He argues state versus private control over the delivery of clientelist resources varies across political regimes, and this affects the demand for Chinese infrastructure spending that is principally delivered by SOEs. He argues electoral autocracies, which hold semi-competitive elections, possess the highest demand due to their heavy reliance on clientelism coupled with a high level of state control over the corporate sector.

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

The chapter focuses on how the European Union (EU) and European powers have struggled to navigate between transatlantic alliance and growing Eurasian connectivity, which is energized recently by China’s rise. When first proposed by the EU in 2016, “strategic autonomy” was about the European search for independent capacity to militarily balance against the Russian power. When applied to Asia, the concept is mainly about Europe’s choice in a region, which is fast becoming the center of the global political economy but is increasingly dominated by US-China competition. With the EU labeling China “a systemic rival,” the multipolarization behind European strategic autonomy has hardly unfolded as envisioned by Beijing. The chapter first examines Europe’s limited presence in Asian security and addresses the unfulfilled transatlantic potential under the US rebalance towards Asia during the Obama administration. Next it analyzes the European search for strategic autonomy amid the emerging great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific. Finally it examines the geoeconomics associated with the Belt and Road Initiative and Europe’s broad relationship with China.

The chapter first identifies the puzzle of how China’s illiberal polity could convince many quarters of the world to support the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Chinese-led transformative, global infrastructural program. The next section investigates how China’s all-in commitment quickly launched the program but doing so at the expense of its sustainability. The following section discusses why credibility matters for the BRI and China’s broad foreign policy agenda. The last section considers how mounting sustainability challenges are transforming the dynamics of the BRI, forcing China to scale back its investment and ambitions. The conclusion highlights how China’s priority has changed from projecting Beijing’s commitment to securing the BRI’s long-term viability and what the policy shift means for the initiative’s future evolution.

Building on the discussion of the Belt and Road Initiative, the chapter offers a comprehensive inquiry into China’s economic statecraft. It first argues that the analogy often drawn between the BRI and the Marshall Plan misconstrues contemporary China’s economic statecraft. It then examines how the interest communities and partnership diplomacy serve as mechanisms for China’s economic influence. The next section considers how, with Chinese economic ascendancy in Asia, a semblance of Chinese centrality in Asia is emerging. The following section looks at China’s global influence effect in terms of the international discourse on its great-power standing as well as its drive for technical standard-setting in key industries. Lastly, the chapter discusses the built-in limits of the BRI and broad limitations of the Chinese economic statecraft in the twenty-first century.