Traversing the Belt and Road
The World According to China and China According to the World
Jorge Heine editor Min Ye editor Grant Rhode editor Andrew Roger Wilson editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Harvard University, Asia Center
Publishing:27th Nov '26
£29.95
This title is due to be published on 27th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Is China’s signature global strategy a boon to world development or a channel for control? Traversing the Belt and Road brings together leading voices from China and across the globe to examine the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) a decade after its launch. Spanning Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa, these essays highlight the diverse patterns and evolving dynamics across both the land-based and maritime Silk Roads. The volume’s findings—that while the BRI has facilitated development convergence in many regions, it has also intensified geopolitical competition and posed new governance challenges—are both encouraging and sobering.
Engaging with key debates in world development and great-power rivalry, this book unpacks the BRI’s adaptive nature and highlights its shift toward green and digital globalization. The wide range of methods employed—including comparative case studies, historical inquiry, statistical modeling, and field-based research—show how local agency, institutional variation, and global dynamics have shaped outcomes on the ground. An indispensable resource for scholars, students, and policy analysts, Traversing the Belt and Road offers a timely and empirically grounded perspective on China’s global ambitions—and the roadblocks in its path.
If you prefer fact-based insights to polemical narratives about the international effects of China’s return to wealth and power, you’ll love this book. It is a highly readable, multi-faceted evaluation of the first decade of the Belt and Road Initiative—China’s controversial strategy for global geoeconomic integration—its benefits to the Global South, its implications for global peace and development, and its evolving challenges to the fading, Western-dominated world order. -- U.S. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Defense
After more than a decade of grand deals and disappointments, China's global infrastructure push is due for a reevaluation. Traversing the Belt and Road delivers the most rigorous and multifaceted assessment to date. -- Jonathan E. Hillman, author of The Digital Silk Road and The Emperor’s New Road
Few concepts elicit such a combination of awe and apprehension as China’s Belt and Road initiative. Is it development assistance or a debt trap? Does it signal China’s peaceful rise or its geopolitical ambitions? Who is in, and who is out? This book offers the definitive study of the evolution and enduring impact of Xi Jinping’s signature, landscape-altering initiative from a premier group of scholars and practitioners. -- William C. Kirby, Harvard University
A tour de force that brings geopolitics into sharp focus, making sense of the diverse views of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its signature foreign policy initiative on infrastructure and connectivity. This is the go-to volume for scholars, policy makers, and anyone seeking to understand what the BRI was—and what it has become and why -- Jean C. Oi, Standford University
Few topics are as controversial as China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This volume presents rigorous, readable work by outstanding scholars that separates myth from fact and sheds light on one of the most powerful aspects of China’s foreign and commercial policy today -- Rana Mitter, Harvard University
ISBN: 9780674307391
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
396 pages