Tension and Rivalry: The ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative, Global Governance, and International Law

Abstract

This article attempts to establish a context in which the controversies of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its practice can be better understood. It is argued that, earlier, the background to the birth of the BRI had effectively determined the initial perception of the initiative as a geopolitical move and that this perception has increasingly led to a view that the initiative is a Chinese geo-economic strategy. While there is no universally agreed meaning of the notion ‘geo-economics’, this notion, more often than not, conjures images of winners and losers in geopolitical manoeuvring. As such, China needs to convince the world that the BRI is indeed a ‘win-win’ scenario in international cooperation. To do so, China needs to engage much more closely with international law and talk less about China’s own model of global governance.