Critical Reflections on China's Belt & Road Initiative

This book provides insights into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It offers critical perspectives from various directions, not excluding historical investigations, human geography approaches and neo-Marxist inclinations.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents one of the biggest geopolitical visions since the Cold War and offers the possibilities of an intercontinental vision of Aid politics, along with prospects for pan-Asianism. By and large, any geopolitical vision that purports to foster inter-regional dialogue and materialist development of peoples and economies is bound to have its flaws. The Belt and Road Initiative bears hallmarks of the socio-political tradition of Chinese authoritarian infrastructure politics while also offering a possible alternative to the so-called 'Washington Consensus' of free markets, deregulation and a shift towards liberal democracy.

Additionally, the Belt and Road Initiative opens up wide open intellectual spaces for dialogues between Asians, Arabs and Westerners on the meaning of inclusive inter-continental relationships in philosophy, geography and economics.  The significance of this is often underplayed in Chinese official statements whereas this book introduces these possibilities within its assorted sections.

Alan Chong is Associate Professor at the Centre for Multilateralism Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He has published widely on the notion of soft power and the role of ideas in constructing the international relations of Singapore and Asia. 

Pham Quang Minh is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH), Vietnam National University-Hanoi. His main teaching and research interests, among the other things, are world politics, international relations of Asia-Pacific, and Vietnam's foreign policy.