ABSTRACT
China’s economic and political relations with other countries have become complex and intertwined, as the nation has risen to a position of prominence in an ever more interconnected world. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is, in part, an attempt to recast China’s international expansion as descending from a tradition of harmonious cooperation and connectivity between Asia and Europe via historical ‘silk roads’. However, the identity of the BRI (if it has one) remains elusive, with interpretations from scholars existing on a polarised spectrum from ‘China threat’ to ‘China opportunity’. Undoubtedly, it is far from easy to theorise such a vast, ambitious project as the BRI. Given the difficulty of placing President Xi Jinping’s flagship foreign policy initiative neatly into one of international relations (IR) theory’s paradigms, there is a need for an approach to the BRI which takes account of both its complexity and the need to combine elements from different theoretical traditions in an eclectic manner. Thus, the frame for this book’s investigation of the BRI combines complexity theory (CT) and analytic eclecticism in its theoretical-methodological framework, which is here termed ‘complex eclecticism’.
