THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE IN GLOBAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is perhaps the most important manifestation of China's global ascendancy. The literature across the world about the initiative cannot agree on whether it represents a new form of imperialism or a “soft power” expression of a “win–win” project. I will try to grasp the genealogy of the BRI in relation both to the imperial and revolutionary Chinese world order and the historical sequence of forms of global domination, that is, modern imperialism and the “imperialism of nation-states” during the interwar and Cold War period as well as the post-Cold War notion of “soft power.” While we may think of the BRI as poised uncertainly between the logics of the older Chinese ideas and the more recent logic impelled by capitalist nation-states, there are significant novelties in the new Chinese order, mostly in relation to debt, the environment, and digital technology, which constitute new realms of power not easily dominated by a hegemon.
