Perception and Strategy of ASEAN’s States on China’s Footprints under Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Perspectives of State-Society-Business with Balancing-Bandwagoning-Hedging Consideration

Abstract

This special issue will propose that the changing relations among state-market-society in ASEAN’s states will play the crucial impact toward China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Under such circumstances, the changing state-market-society relations from internal and external impacts will reshape or modify their development strategy on China’s footprint in ASEAN by way of adopting balancing, bandwagoning, cooperating, or hedging consideration. The hedging strategical framework can be constructed and analyzed on each ASEAN’s country how to effectively deal with China’s economic and political involvement. It will be concerned that the hedging strategic framework is a combination of consideration on resisting, balancing, bandwagoning, and cooperating measures in order to efficiently and rationally deal with great powers like China, in different aspects and degrees. The application of general hedging framework is a kind of risk and benefit management strategy for ASEAN states toward China’s dominance on BRI that is smartly used by ASEAN states to pursue economic gains and to enjoy relative political autonomy at the same time.