Thenew silk roads: Defining China’s grand strategy

Abstract

The chapter analyses China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as Beijing’s grand strategy to assert and legitimate its foreign policy objective of becoming world leader by 2049. Despite Chinese rhetoric about BRI being a project that will benefit the international community and which is in line with the current international order, realpolitik factors inform and drive the project, as China reinforces its exports, increases its sphere of influence, and increasingly sets tomorrow’s norms. In doing so, China projects an image of a country with the objective and power resources of a great power that is ready and willing to take the lead in international affairs. The chapter argues that China mobilizes and operationalizes all the dimensions of power to implement its grand strategy and achieve its aim. Thus, coercion, threats, predatory economics, soft power projection, norms contestation and rules- and institution-building are concealed by social and discursive power of cooperation and connectedness.