As the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) entering its second decade, it is crucial to provide an updated understanding of China’s expanding global influence. While China’s traditional role as the 'World's factory' is undergoing transformation, it is actively shaping a new global world order that challenges Western political-economic dominance through the BRI. However, there is a dearth of robust geographical research, particularly from the Global South where China's influence is most pronounced.
This special issue seeks to update geographical scholarship on China’s growing global influence through the BRI by inviting geographical research contributions from an international perspective. Rather than aiming to establish a unified or singular understanding of the BRI, they acknowledge and embrace its inherent complexity, incoherence, contradictions, and evolutionary nature. The BRI is a contested process of governance that involves not only state and business elites from China, but also local officials, small businesses, communities, media outlets, NGOs, each driven by distinct and often contradictory personal, political, and economic motivations and objectives. They aim to cover diverse theoretical perspectives and geographical contexts to capture this complexity. Their international-geographical approach offers a valuable means to navigate the opaque realm of BRI politics, moving beyond the stagnant debates surrounding the definition of the BRI and its classification as a geoeconomic or geopolitical endeavor. They want to overcome the limits of high-level geopolitical and geoeconomic narratives on the BRI. By emphasizing grounded empirical research that examines international and local actors affected by or engaged in the BRI, as well as the localized relationships and contextual dynamics, it is hoped a deeper understanding of China’s global ambitions will be gained and the analytical lens widened, thus empowering a better understanding of how China operates within and shape the global order, as well as transcending abstract discussions to analyze the tangible impacts and interactions on the ground.
In this special issue, Linda, Kevin and Mark, seek qualitative and quantitative empirical research (such as case studies, comparative studies, surveys) exploring China’s international influence and the BRI. Broad geographical coverage is desired, and they particularly welcome contributions from scholars from the Global South.
Manuscript submission deadline: 31 August 2024