Description
US-China relations have soured over the last decade, developing a multifaceted strategic competition which has shifted and evolved across this time. One area of this strategic competition is China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 as a series of infrastructure and connectivity projects, and quickly gaining traction as China’s ‘project of the century’, along with associated pushback from the US and its allies (Zhao, 2021; Shah, 2023).
This research investigates the evolution of the contestation of Belt and Road by the US and China, based on a comprehensive review of Chinese government publications and US strategic discourse on BRI, and interviewing key policymakers and scholars working on BRI. Utilising a strategic narrative approach, as popularised by Miskimmon et al (2013), the research focuses on how strategic narratives on BRI are deployed by Chinese and US geostrategic elites, and explores the interaction between these competing narratives. Thus, as well as tracing the evolution of US-China relations and the emergence of strategic competition, further insight into the use of narrative in international relations is also found through the case study of Belt and Road.
Keywords: US-China relations, Belt and Road, strategic narrative
References:
Miskimmon, Alister, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle. Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Shah, Abdur Rehman. ‘Revisiting China Threat: The US’ Securitization of the “Belt and Road Initiative”’. Chinese Political Science Review 8, no. 1 (1 March 2023): 84–104.
Zhao, Minghao. ‘The Belt and Road Initiative and China–US Strategic Competition’. China International Strategy Review 3, no. 2 (1 December 2021): 248–60.
