Abstract
The purpose of the BRI not only to impact the global political economy; but also to change the way others relate to and think about the global political economy and their role in it, in dialogue with China’s proposal. In other words, the BRI is not only concept that raises the question of the quantitative changes in the global political economy—it equally concerns the question of qualitative, normative changes, or rather the questions how and against what backdrop will the China-led interactions along the Belt&Road develop, and what are their normative implications. This chapter therefore aims to provide an innovative and critical normative reading of the BRI. As a concept, the BRI is rooted in the thinking and practice of CPC and at the same time a product of a changing Chinese, but also changing global context. The chapter therefore briefly analyzes the normative sources of the BRI, which are to be found in China’s own developmental path and its new foreign policy under Xi Jinping. Then, the chapter turns to analysis of the six core normative principles of the BRI: shared destiny, sovereignty, state-led economic cooperation, new regionalism, and the philosophy of flexible, experimental and exception-ridden practice. The final section turns to the discussion of the potential pathways of diffusion of these normative principles along the countries and regions involved in the BRI.
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Notes
- 1.
See Xinhua News (2017).
- 2.
See Li (2017b). XJP Thought follows Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, The Important Thought of the Three Represents, and the Scientific Outlook on Development as the foundational ideological inputs of the CPC. The fact that Xi’s contribution was codified during, and not after his tenure, that his input carries his name and is categorized as “Thought” (sixiang) rather than as a “Theory” (lilun), suggests a significant turn to ideology of the Party, after a prolonged period of experimentation and pragmatism.
- 3.
For example, see Johnson (2016).
- 4.
An important resource where a number of documents and speeches on the BRI can be found is www.yidaiyilu.gov.cn.
- 5.
A particularly interesting question is what has been the popularity of the BRI. According to one editor of a prestigious Chinese journal, by 2017 there are more than seven million papers written on the BRI, arguably the majority in China itself. One possible future research project would be to systematically assess how well known is the BRI outside China.
- 6.
Ferdinand (2016).
- 7.
Fasslabend (2015).
- 8.
Hall (2017).
- 9.
See more in Vangeli (in press-a).
- 10.
- 11.
Some of the important concepts have been as well as the Beijing Consensus (Ramo 2007; Li et al. 2010) and the China Model—and their limits (Zhao 2010; Breslin 2011), their diffusion or lack thereof (Ambrosio 2012) and their exportability under the BRI (Fukuyama 2016), the alternative path to Chinese modernity (Jacques 2012); normative power China (Womack 2008; Kavalski 2013), China’s soft power (Barr 2011); Chinese tianxia-nism (Godehardt 2016), and China’s influence in global governance (Beeson and Li 2016).
- 12.
- 13.
For a Marxist analysis see Boer (2017).
- 14.
On state capitalism, see Bremmer (2008).
- 15.
On neoliberalism as political technology, see Ong (2012).
- 16.
On developmental state, see Wade (2004).
- 17.
See the analysis by Pantucci (2016).
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
On the Two Centennial Goals, see the Q&A by Xinhua News (huaxia 2017).
- 21.
On the changes in China’s global posture, see the seminal work by Yan (2014).
- 22.
See Yang (2015).
- 23.
Importantly, as China is rising, and aside from the BRI, it is also increasing its commitments in terms of development aid. Arguably, China’s development aid has had positive impact on the beneficiaries (Dreher et al. 2017).
- 24.
Some authors refer to this as a call of an inclusive globalization (Liu and Dunford 2016).
- 25.
See the official document by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (2015).
- 26.
For instance, Chen (2017).
- 27.
For production capacity cooperation, see Qiu (2015b).
- 28.
The concept of the community of common destiny is explained in the paper of Zhang (2015).
- 29.
For the terminology debate, see the contribution by Xie (2015).
- 30.
For the historic evolution of China as a global actor see Wang (2008).
- 31.
See Blumenthal (2017).
- 32.
For illustration, see the speech by Xi Jinping at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2017 (Xi 2017).
- 33.
See Reuters (2017).
- 34.
See Wang (2008).
- 35.
See Li et al. (2010).
- 36.
See Nathan (2015).
- 37.
For an overview of China’s exceptionalism, but also how it compares to the American and European exceptionalisms, see the work by Bradford and Posner (2011).
- 38.
Personal interview.
- 39.
See for example, this controversial piece by Li (2017).
- 40.
For the “going global” strategy see Bernasconi-Osterwalder et al. (2013).
- 41.
See Kirby (2011).
- 42.
See the work by Zhao (2008).
- 43.
See Gitter (2017).
- 44.
See Overholt (2010).
- 45.
A particular conflict of Chinese vs Western thinking of this sort happens in the region of the Western Balkans, which is the European Union (EU) enlargement area, and therefore closely supervised the by the EU.
- 46.
Personal interview.
- 47.
- 48.
See Sheng and Geng (2017).
- 49.
See the speech by Viktor Orban (Hungarian Government 2014).
- 50.
For an exploratory text, see Bryant and Chou (2016).
- 51.
See the report by Financial Times (Beesley et al. 2017).
- 52.
See Peto (2017).
- 53.
Andornino (2017) calls the BRI a project through which China excercises “connective leadership”.
- 54.
Personal interview.
- 55.
For a comparative analysis on China’s regionalism as visible in the BRI, see Kaczmarski (2017).
- 56.
For a comparative study on China’s platforms for multilateral cooperation, see Jakobowski (in press).
- 57.
Ong (2012).
- 58.
See Vasiliev and Shmigelskaia (2016).
- 59.
See Castellucci (2007).
- 60.
See Leander (2008).
- 61.
See Lee (2016).
- 62.
For Global China and symbolic power, see Vangeli (in press-b).
- 63.
- 64.
See Fukuyama (2016).
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Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius for the generous support of their work in the period 2015–2018.
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Vangeli, A. (2018). The Normative Foundations of the Belt and Road Initiative. In: Shan, W., Nuotio, K., Zhang, K. (eds) Normative Readings of the Belt and Road Initiative. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78018-4_4
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