Demystifying Chinese overseas investment in infrastructure: Port development, the Belt and Road Initiative and regional development

By Zhigao Liu, Seth Schindler, Weidong Liu. 2020

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract China's outward investment has increased tremendously in recent years and it is currently a global leader in the construction of transportation infrastructure. While its signature ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) is often portrayed as a threat by policy makers and media in the West, this article approaches the BRI from the perspective of Beijing. We review Chinese infrastructure investment and show that rather than a monolithic strategy aimed at world domination, the BRI is driven by a range of Chinese stakeholders situated at different scales whose motives vary from achieving strategic geopolitical advantage to profit-maximization. We focus on port investments to demonstrate that the BRI accelerated an ongoing trend of increasing Chinese investment in overseas ports that began in the early 2000s. We subsequently present mini-case studies of port projects Gwadar, Pakistan and Kuantan, Malaysia, which illustrate that large Central Government state-owned enterprises (SOEs) pursue strategic objectives while SOEs situated at the province and city levels are motivated by economic incentives. All Chinese investors embrace the ‘port-park-city’ model pioneered by Shenzhen, and we highlight its potential to foster regional development. We conclude that future research on Chinese infrastructure projects should be relational, multi-scalar and multi-sited.

Subfields: Anthropology, Economics and Econometrics, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9354fdca4491e4f785a66c68f87e5a3c543ede6