ABSTRACT
This collection evaluates BRI as an expression of President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. This envisions the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with unquestioned global predominance presiding over a “community of shared destiny for all humankind” by 2049 to mark the centenary of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule over the PRC. Beginning with official loans to kickstart infrastructure, trade, and investment cooperation to sustain the PRC’s own growth and advancement, BRI supports bilateral and regional political, cultural, technological, and security cooperation with developing countries to harmonize their interests and thinking with the Chinese Dream vision of a community of shared fate supporting PRC global leadership aspirations. This collection investigates how well BRI cooperation across developing subregions in Africa, Europe, and Asia is serving this purpose. The focus is on local stakeholder perceptions of BRI cooperation results in order to better understand the present state of the BRI with respect to the Chinese Dream agenda. Chapters in this volume reveal a pattern of provisional success with a few notable and significant failures to suggest that BRI has successfully deepened economic dependence on the PRC, but prospects for its ultimate success in integrating a diverse periphery into an integrated whole united behind PRC leadership remains unclear.
