Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: beyond ‘grand strategy’ to a state transformation analysis
Lee Jones and Jinghan Zeng
ABSTRACT
China's massive'Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) – designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa– is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down 'grand strategy', reflecting Beijing's growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China's foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, indeterminate scheme, driven primarily by competing domestic interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle for power and resources are already shaping BRI's design and implementation. This will generate outcomes that often diverge from top leaders'intentions and may even undermine key foreign policy goals.
Introduction
Since 2013,'one belt, one road' (OBOR) – later renamed the'Belt and Road Initiative'(BRI)–has emerged as President Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy initiative. Western analysts typically depict BRI as a new, more'proactive"grand strategy', designed to produce'a more multipolar order, in Asia and globally'.1 It is described as a 'well thought-out Chinese grand strategy ... [designed] to reclaim [China's] geopolitical dominance in Asia ... [challenge] US dominance and ... create a Chinese-centered order'.2 Described as a 'geopolitical and diplomatic offensive'3 or'Chinese neo-imperialism',4 BRI is said to aim at'nothing less than rewriting the current geopolitical landscape'5 oreven'world dominance'.6Through it, Xi supposedly seeks 'to re-constitute the regional order – and eventually global order – with new governance ideas, norms, and rules'.7 Some Chinese scholars and officials also frame BRI as a 'grand strategy',8 a'great initiative'planned personally by Xi, reflecting his strategic thought,9 aiming to restore China's'rightful'great-power status.10
This article offers a rather different interpretation of BRI. Foregrounding the Chinese party-state's post-1978 transformation, we argue that extant perspectives overestimate Chinese leaders'capacity to create and implement grand strategy. Chinese foreign policy is actually shaped by evolving contestation among fragmented, decentralised and partially internationalised party-state apparatuses and their societal allies. Projects like BRI are not meticulously planned by top leaders; rather, they are loose 'policy envelopes', whose parameters and implementation are shaped by internal struggles for power and resources. They are kept deliberately vague to accommodate these diverse interests, creating wide latitude for them to influence, interpret and even ignore top leaders'wishes. Accordingly, BRI is already unfolding in a fragmented, incoherent fashion, departing significantly from both its original design, in 2013, as part of'periphery diplomacy', and from formal, top-level plans issued in 2015. This may generate outcomes that, far from reshaping the world in China's image, could undermine Chinese foreign policy objectives.
The article, which draws on both open source material and fieldwork in China, proceeds in three subsequent parts.The first describes our theoretical position, focused on state transformation. It identifies the main contours of changes in China's party-state and the implications for foreign policy making and implementation. The second section considers a forerunner of BRI, China's 'Great Western Development'campaign, to illustrate these dynamics in action and gain clues as to how BRI may unfold. The third section shows how state transformation is shaping BRI's form, content and execution, with outcomes determined by ongoing contestation rather than a clearly-defined, top-down grand strategy.The conclusion discusses the implications for BRI's future development.
State transformation and Chinese foreign policy making
This section describes major changes in the Chinese party-state that make it unlikely that BRI can be a detailed grand strategy with clear goals and predictable outcomes. This transformation involves three interrelated trends: fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation. Although the first two were noted prior to 1978,11 they dramatically intensified in the subsequent, pro-market'reform'era, while the third trend is entirely novel. Together, they involve a qualitative transformation of China's party-state.This transformation is typically ignored in International Relations (IR), but China scholars have studied it extensively,12 with some exploring its impact on foreign policy.13This literature shows that foreign policy making and implementation is no longer limited to a fewtop leaders imposing top-down decisions, but involves ongoing, multi-level, multi-agency bargaining, whereby apparently subordinate actors may influence, interpret or even ignore central policy.
The first form of state transformation is fragmentation:piecemeal reform of party-state apparatuses, dispersing authority to numerous, often overlapping, agencies, ministries and quasi-independent regulators.14 Struggling for power and resources, these actors frequently issue contradictory guidance and pursue different policy goals. For instance, by 2011, 22 different agencies had some jurisdiction over maritime policy, with inter-agency rivalry directly generating clashes with neighbouring countries.15 Fragmentation thus extends to foreign policy, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is frequently bypassed by stronger actors. These include: the armed forces and the Ministries of Defence and Public Security (especially in security and military matters, including maritime law enforcement); the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), responsible for China's foreign economic relations, including overseas aid; the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the People's Bank of China (PBC), in financial and monetary matters; the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), on overseas investment and climate change; policy banks, which fund foreign trade, investment and tied aid; the Communist Party's International Department, which manages party-to-party ties and dominates North Korea policy; and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), whose autonomous overseas investments often involve serious diplomatic repercussions.16
The second trend is the decentralisationof power, resource control, and policy making and implementation, particularly to provincial governments, creating a 'de factofederal' state.17 Subnational governments can 'adjust' national policies to local circumstances, producing constant multi-level bargaining around, and substantial non-compliance with, central initiatives.18 Provincial governors – equally ranked to government ministers – now manage provinces'external economic relations, turning provinces into quasi-autonomous international actors that conclude international agreements and sometimes behave in ways diverging from or undermining central foreign policy.19
The third trend is internationalisation,whereby formerly domestic actors acquire an international role.This includes: provincial governments, which are involved in managing transboundary economic and security issues;20 the PBC, which jointly regulates global finance through the Basle banking commission;21 functional ministries relating to environmental and maritime protection and law-enforcement, which collaborate or clash with their international counterparts;22 the Hong Kong and Shanghai financial centres, which lead on renminbiinternationalisation;23 and the many SO...
