Economic Motivations of China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Since the launch of the BRI in 2013, 136 countries and 30 international organizations have signed BRI cooperation documents, received US$90 billion in Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and exchanged US$6 trillion in trade with China. President Xi Jinping has described the BRI as the ‘Project of the Century’, yet the motivations, aims and scope of the BRI have been continuously debated and the Chinese Government has struggled to put forward a clear narrative for the initiative The Silk Road Economic Belt, first announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his September 2013 trip to Kazakhstan, envisions a network of roads and railways, together with a parallel network of pipelines, fiber-optic cables, and telecommunication links, connecting China to Europe via Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus across the 11,000-kilometer-long Eurasian continent. While the “belt” links Eurasia to China by land, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road will comprise a string of ports connecting China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. China’s motivations for this extraordinarily ambitious project are numerous. This article tray to describe the nuts and bolts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the evolution of the concept in Chinese strategic thinking, Examine the internal and external drivers motivating China’s push for the Belt and Road Initiative from an economic, political and strategic standpoint.