Belt and Road Initiative

The “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) has been an eye-catching term among social scientists, including human geographers, across the world. Pointing to the Chinese call for new modes of regional and international cooperation, the BRI originates from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s proposal to develop a “Silk Road Economic Belt” (“One Belt”) and a “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” (“One Road”) during his visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia in 2013. In 2015, the Chinese central government released an Action Plan of the BRI, publicizing its designated principles, framework, as well as cooperation priorities and mechanisms of promoting the BRI. This White Paper has also specified five focuses of future BRI development, including policy coordination, connectivity of infrastructure and facilities, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and closer people-to-people ties. At the end of the BRI’s first five-year development in 2018, the Chinese government announced that it had signed BRI-oriented cooperative agreements with more than one hundred countries and international organizations. Since then, the Chinese government proposed to promote the “high quality” development of the BRI and gradually added new keywords to this grand scheme, including but not limited to “green,” “digital,” and “health.” Existing literature on BRI has incorporated insights of geography, economics, international relations, development studies, and environmental studies. This article contours existing knowledge on the BRI in geography and related disciplines in social sciences, with an integrated sensitivity to spatial embeddedness of specific BRI practices and its consequences. A considerable thread of BRI literature has examined the political economic nature of BRI. The BRI is understood as a Chinese preferred “spatial fix” to its domestic overaccumulation problems as well as a tool to serve China’s geopolitical interests through the making of discourses, imaginaries, and on-ground practices. BRI boosts investment and trade flows through infrastructure and connectivity projects. Although scholarly attention is often paid to the Chinese state as a whole in the discursive and strategic making of BRI, subnational state actors and non-state actors also actively engage with host country actors for specific BRI projects, the implementation of which can be affected by the combined path dependency and temporal-spatial conditions. BRI, in turn, is also examined to inform the nature of contemporary Chinese politics, the ways in which it benefits or affects the economic development and well-being of other populations and the wider environment, the uncertainties and changing spatiality concerning social, cultural, urban and intellectual issues, as well as for methodological reflections.