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INTRODUCTION
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by President Xi Jinping in late 2013, has been the most studied policy from China in recent years. A range of foreign observers have portrayed BRI as Beijing's imperialist ambition to achieve dominance (Economy 2018), realize the “China Dream” (Miller 2017), “entrap” recipient countries (Hoslag 2019), and boost authoritarian values globally (Roth 2019). Such geopolitical characterization has been popular among politicians and think-tanks in the United States (Pence 2018; Russel and Berger 2020), leading to policy responses that advocate “all society” and “all-government” resistance to China (U.S. Department of Defense 2019). Other observers, researching China's domestic politics and BRI projects, have concluded that BRI is China's globalization strategy driven by internal priorities (Ye 2015, 2019, 2020), a spatial fix to address economic challenges (Jones 2019), or state capitalism led by state-owned enterprises (Zeng and Li 2019) and local governments (Li 2020).
Furthermore, as scholars focused on the recipient countries, they found the host was often the driver of BRI projects and the host environment has shaped BRI implementation. Jonathan Hillman (2020) explores different regions’ experiences with BRI throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa. Meg Rithmire and Yinghao Li (2019) explain how the Sri Lankan government was the driver of BRI projects there, and Erica Downs (2019) finds Pakistan was partly to blame for its BRI debt risks and environmental costs. Hong Liu and Guanie Lim (2018), David Lampton, Selina Ho, and Cheng-Chwee Kuik (2020), in particular, compare different BRI projects in Southeast Asian countries to show that home institutions have decisive roles to play, and the Chinese government has been more reactive and “adaptive” to different regions than was initially understood.
These studies have caught important aspects of the BRI, and yet they miss critical dynamics shaping China's state behavior. This article conceptualizes the Chinese state system as an integrated framework that accounts for fragmented actors driving BRI and resulting in contradictory effects, real or misperceived, in China and abroad. The framework has two theoretical underpinnings: firstly, the Chinese state is a tri-block structure, consisting of political leadership, national bureaucracy, and the government's economic arms (i.e., state-owned companies and local governments). Secondly, BRI is not a uniform plan but a process of multiple steps and stages. This...