ABSTRACT
In 2023, the People’s Republic of China celebrated the tenth-year anniversary of the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Deemed one of President Xi Jinping’s signature policies, the BRI has grabbed headlines across the world, to the extent that it has been perceived in some quarters as a catalyst for the advent of a Sino-centric world order. For all the merits of the ‘BRI as grand strategy’ literature, too often such studies mask the need for a more nuanced geopolitical reading of the BRI. As this chapter will highlight, factors such as the policy leeway afforded to Chinese infrastructure actors (state enterprises and policy banks) and the local political agency of participating BRI states have been insufficiently taken into account across the extant literature.
