There is raging speculation about the potential implications of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR)/Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for the global order, spheres of influence and the positions of extra-regional powers. Much commentary is overly broad and lacks a clear and systematic method for examining OBOR/BRI’s future consequences.
This book brings together a diverse range of responses to China's Marine Silk Road Initiative, which proposes to redraw the map of Asia, particularly South Asia. China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) is a massive scheme to connect wide swaths of East, Southeast, South, and West Asia through a dense web of interconnected hard and soft infrastructure involving ports, roads, logistics facilities, special industrial zones, and free trade and investment agreements.
The Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) is a part of China’s experiment in scaling up economic corridors across vast swathes of diverse economic geographies. China’s involvement in a large number of ongoing transport corridor projects has encouraged it to embark on the most ambitious of them all till date. The heterogeneity among the economic capacities and integrations of various regions constituting the MSRI, particularly in efficiency of infrastructure and ability to trade, is noticeable.
Control over access to the Indian Ocean is often seen through a highly securitised lens. Strategic actors have long sought to use geographical constraints to maintain the region as a relatively enclosed strategic space. It has only a few narrow maritime entrance points and the littoral is not well connected to the interior of the Eurasian continent.
This article reviews the literature on China’s twenty-first-century Maritime Silk Road initiative (MSRI) to highlight the narratives surrounding it, its central features, its potential objectives, and the challenges affecting its implementation. It demonstrates that there are numerous political and economic narratives about the MSRI. It further indicates Beijing’s aims to use the MSRI to achieve manifold economic and political ends.
China’s “One Belt, One Road” project is comprised of two components: the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—that were announced separately in 2013. Each component has the potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape through the construction of interrelated infrastructure projects including ports, highways, railways and pipelines.
José Augusto Guilhon Albuquerque and Luís Afonso Fernandes Lima
In this article we explore the political economy of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) in Brazil, and the impact of investment and other economic links on Brazilian foreign policy toward China.
China has become a leading investor in Peru’s extractive sector over the past decade. In this article I discuss the impact of that investment on Peruvian foreign policy and build on interviews with senior executives of Chinese-owned corporations in Peru.
Public, private, and academic institutions, in Mexico and bilaterally with China, ordinarily can facilitate long-range planning, rectify information gaps, and correct misunderstandings. But a dearth of such institutions has hindered the growth of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) in Mexico and spurred negative reactions against it, further dampening Chinese investments.
There is a relative dearth of research on China–Latin America political economic relations, especially where Chinese outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) is concerned. In my introductory article, I aim to enrich our knowledge about how external and internal political and economic factors interact to shape Sino–Latin American links.
