This edited volume brings together a wide range of academics to engage with inter-disciplinary research perspectives in response to the development of The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which opens unparalleled opportunities to gain access to new markets in Asia, Europe and Africa. The collection examines opportunities offered in key areas such as trade and investment, policy coordination, facilities connectivity and cultural exchange. It also notably considers how the historical, environmental, cultural and political background to the BRI impacts this hugely ambitious plan which has been described as the ‘new Silk Road', as well as the challenges across these spheres in a part of the world which has witnessed much instability historically. Chapter "Between Adoption and Resistance. China’s Efforts of ‘Understanding the West,’ the Challenges of Transforming Monarchical Legitimacy, and the Rise of Oriental Exceptionalism, 1860-1910” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Officially announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has since become the centrepiece of China’s economic diplomacy. It is a commitment to ease bottlenecks to Eurasian trade by improving and building networks of connectivity across Central and Western Asia, where the BRI aims to act as a bond for the projects of regional cooperation and integration already in progress in Southern Asia. But it also reaches out to the Middle East as well as East and North Africa, a truly strategic area where the Belt joins the Road. Europe, the end-point of the New Silk Roads, both by land and by sea, is the ultimate geographic destination and political partner in the BRI. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the BRI, its logic, rationale and implications for international economic and political relations.

Bringing together a collection of interdisciplinary chapters on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, or also known as One Belt One Road), this book offers a comprehensive overview of the topic from a business and management perspective. With contributions from scholars based in Asia, Europe and North America, Volume I provides theoretical and empirical analysis of the opportunities and challenges facing businesses in relation to BRI. Key areas covered include economics and finance, history, trade, value chain and human resource and cross-cultural management, creating a useful tool for academics, as well as policy-makers and practitioners in China and other countries along the new Silk Road.

International Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative investigates the most significant global‐scale international trade expansion and capital investment programme since the Second World War. This book focusses on the multi-national perspectives of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in order to interrogate the Chinese government’s representation of it as a symbol of "peace, cooperation, development and mutual benefit." With specific focus on the interrelationship between geopolitics, infrastructure investments and urban regional development, the book reflects on 12 countries’ experiences in depth, including those of Iran, Pakistan, Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and Ethiopia, specificly to their economic development levels, political systems, power dynamics and socio-environmental issues. The book clarifies and contributes new knowledge on the nature of BRI concerning its relationship to globalism, neo-colonialism, the notion of developed vs developing countries and their institutions and macro-micro benefits and impacts. In doing so, the book offers a balanced account of the antagonistic geo-political narrative of socio-political conflict and the collaborative framework of real socio-economic flows and development. The book will appeal to academics, researchers and policy-makers with an interest in the BRI and its impacts on politico-economic development and urban, regional and spatial systems in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the "workshop of the world." Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country's internal dynamics--China's politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development--few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world. In China Goes Global, eminent China scholar David Shambaugh delivers the book that many have been waiting for--a sweeping account of China's growing prominence on the international stage. Thirty years ago, China's role in global affairs beyond its immediate East Asian periphery was decidedly minor and it had little geostrategic power. Today however, China's expanding economic power has allowed it to extend its reach virtually everywhere--from mineral mines in Africa, to currency markets in the West, to oilfields in the Middle East, to agribusiness in Latin America, to the factories of East Asia. Shambaugh offers an enlightening look into the manifestations of China's global presence: its extensive commercial footprint, its growing military power, its increasing cultural influence or "soft power," its diplomatic activity, and its new prominence in global governance institutions. But Shambaugh is no alarmist. In this balanced and well-researched volume, he argues that China's global presence is more broad than deep and that China still lacks the influence befitting a major world power--what he terms a "partial power." He draws on his decades of China-watching and his deep knowledge of the subject, and exploits a wide variety of previously untapped sources, to shed valuable light on China's current and future roles in world affairs.

One of Chinese president Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy programs is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a web of infrastructure development plans designed to increase Eurasian economic integration. Chinese official rhetoric on the BRI focuses on its economic promise and progress, often in altruistic terms: all countries have been invited to board this "express train" to wealth and prosperity. Missing from the rhetoric is much discussion of the initiative's security dimensions and implications. Chinese officials avoid describing the strategic benefits they think the BRI could produce, while also gliding over major security risks and concerns. Yet at the unofficial level, China's security community has paid close attention to these issues, probing in great depth the gains Beijing can expect, the challenges it will face, and the new demands it will have to satisfy. Understanding those Chinese assessments is helpful as the United States considers how, when, and in what capacity to engage the BRI.

2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regionals networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in this volume provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.

The Chinese shipping industry is a particularly prominent industry and has rapidly expanded over the last decade. Amazingly, literature on the subject is scarce and this is the first book to focus on it specifically. Bringing together a team of well-known shipping, logistics, economics and political science scholars from the Far East, Europe and the Americas, the volume provides an up-to-date overview of the Chinese shipping industry and its place in international shipping. The contributors analyze and discuss all the relevant major business issues, including marketing, finance, the politics of its development and its organizational structures. The volume will be of critical interest to both academics and professionals in the fields of shipping and transport, transport economics, and business planning and strategy.

Launched in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging connections in infrastructure, trade, energy, finance, tourism, and culture across Eurasia and Africa. This extraordinarily ambitious strategy places China at the center of a geography of overland and maritime connectivity stretching across more than sixty countries and incorporating almost two-thirds of the world’s population. But what does it mean to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century? Geocultural Power explores this question by considering how China is couching its strategy for building trade, foreign relations, and energy and political security in an evocative topography of history. Until now Belt and Road has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. This book introduces geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Tim Winter highlights how many countries—including Iran, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others—are revisiting their histories to find points of diplomatic and cultural connection. Through the revived Silk Roads, China becomes the new author of Eurasian history and the architect of the bridge between East and West. In a diplomatic dance of forgetting, episodes of violence, invasion, and bloodshed are left behind for a language of history and heritage that crosses borders in ways that further the trade ambitions of an increasingly networked China-driven economy.

Infrastructure is essential for development. This report presents a snapshot of the current condition of developing Asia's infrastructure---defined here as transport, power, telecommunications, and water supply and sanitation. It examines how much the region has been investing in infrastructure and what will likely be needed through 2030. Finally, it analyzes the financial and institutional challenges that will shape future infrastructure investment and development.