The Belt and Road Initiative in China's Emerging Grand Strategy of Connective Leadership

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/cwe.12211
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Published date: 01 September 2017

©2017 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

China & World Economy / 4–22, Vol. 25, No. 5, 2017

4

The Belt and Road Initiative in China’s Emerging

Grand Strategy of Connective Leadership

Giovanni B. Andornino*

Abstract

As Chinese leaders endeavor to maintain the international environment aligned with

their strategic aim of realizing the “dream of national rejuvenation,” the remarkable

increase in China’s capabilities, coupled with uncertainty in the global economy and the

ambivalent attitude of the USA toward the international order, poses fresh challenges to

Beijing’s foreign policy. The present paper argues that a lexicographic preference for the

mitigation of the risk of pushback against China’s core interests underpins the Belt and

Road Initiative. Pursuing a strategy of credible reassurance commensurate to the shift in

the distribution of power in China’s neighborhood and globally, President Xi Jinping’s

administration has been cultivating a form of connective leadership that commits China

to the encapsulation of the Belt and Road Initiative for transregional connectivity into

its own national development strategy, generating an octroyé, non-hegemonic, type of

international social capital, and integrating the existing order without corroborating the

position of its founder.

Key words: Belt and Road Initiative, China, connective leadership, grand strategy,

international order, social capital

JEL codes: E60, F01, F50, F55

I. Introduction

The US-led liberal-multilateral international order, around which the expectations of the

key actors in the international system (states) have converged for decades, is in a state

of ux. While the principles, norms, rules and regimes which structure a multilateral

order are naturally prone to change over time, concurrent shifts in the commitment of

*Giovanni B. Andornino, Assistant Professor, Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of

Torino, Italy. Email: giovanni.andornino@unito.it. The author wishes to thank several participants of the Belt

and Road Forum for International Cooperation (Beijing, May 2017) for commenting on earlier versions of

this essay, as well as members of the 2017 TOChina InSite program (Beijing and Tianjin, July 2017), and

the students from the China & Global Studies graduate program (University of Torino) for their valuable

contributions while discussing China’s evolving foreign policy posture and the BRI. Financial support by the

Torino World Aairs Institute is gratefully acknowledged (Global China Program, 2017).

©2017 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The BRI in China's Emerging Grand Strategy of Connective Leadership 5

the hegemon, in the concentration of material and ideational power within the system,

and in the grand strategy of the leading rising power appear to be paving the way for a

structural, if incremental, realignment in the political topography of the order itself.

The 2016 elections in the USA have upended a long-standing foreign policy

tradition of global engagement and liberal order building by handing the presidency

to a candidate running on a Jacksonian platform (Mead, 2017). President Trump has

expressed strong skepticism of multilateralism and international institutions as a means

to secure national interests, signaling that under his stewardship the USA is likely to be

“far less willing to lend its still-signicant resources, both material and ideational, in

defense of the liberal international order” (Ikenberry and Lim, 2017, p. 17).

Contextually, the remarkable preponderance of power underpinning US hegemony

(Clark, 2011) has become increasingly diluted. “The diusion of power among states

and from states to informal networks will have a dramatic impact, […] restoring Asia’s

weight in the global economy, and ushering in a new era of ‘democratization’ at the

international and domestic level” (National Intelligence Council, 2012, p. iii). For its

part, following the traumatic clash with Western imperialism and more than a century of

domestic disorder, China has since 1978 adroitly reverted to an age-old strategy of self-

strengthening by pursuing accelerated modernization without antagonizing other units in

the international system. Foregoing the logic of immediate relative gains to focus on the

long-term accumulation of comprehensive national power (Yan, 2014), China has rmly

established herself as an indispensable regional player in Asia (Buzan et al., 2004),

while nurturing co-dependency with the USA as a middle course between balancing and

bandwagoning (Leverett and Wu, 2016). Today, although Chinese ocials still avoid

describing China as a potential superpower for both ideological and functional reasons

(Pu, 2017), there is broad consensus around the idea that China’s call for a “new type

of Great Power relations” (xinxing daguo guanxi) rests on the assumption of a more

symmetrical position vis-à-vis the USA (Zeng and Breslin, 2016).

In recent years, Beijing’s foreign policy posture has become increasingly assertive,

as was shown by its reactions to a chain of events in 2010 (Wang, 2011). Following

the 2007–2008 crisis of the US and European financial systems, as well as its own

overtaking of Japan as the second-largest economy in the world, China’s new centrality

in what David Lake terms the “international economic infrastructure” (Lake, 1993)

appeared to modify Beijing’s demeanor in international affairs. Converting economic

might into foreign policy inuence, however, has proved insidious. Pulled in opposing

directions by its long-standing counter-hegemonic foreign policy orientation (Leverett

and Wu, 2016), and by the need to preserve the “twenty years’ period of strategic

opportunity” (zhanlue jiyuqi) for national development as envisaged by then general