In the ten years since its conception, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has morphed into a trillion dollar global infrastructure enterprise. The attention it has been receiving is frequently mixed with suspicion about China’s presence on the global stage. However, any BRI project involves multiple actors beyond China and interacts with pre-existing infrastructure and conditions. How do national governments and elites as well as the EU perceive and utilize BRI infrastructure projects, do they actually serve their intended purpose and what are the outcomes for locals? Beril Ocaklı’s guests share their insights on three specific and telling cases: Nadia Ali on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, Valentin Krüsmann on the construction of the E60 highway in Georgia and Tamás Peragovics on the Hungarian government’s handling of the Budapest-Belgrade railway construction.

(Music: “Complete” by Modul is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0-License.)

Speakers:

Nadia Ali (Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies) https://www.bicc.de/about/staff/staffmember/member/899-ali/

Valentin Krüsmann (ZOiS): https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/about-us/staff/valentin-kruesmann

Tamás Peragovics (Institute of World Economics Budapest, Visiting Researcher at ZOiS) https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/about-us/staff/tamas-peragovics

Beril Ocaklı (ZOiS) https://www.zois-berlin.de/ueber-uns/mitarbeiterinnen/dr-beril-ocakli

Further reading:

ZOiS Spotlight | Tamás Peragovics, ‘China in Central Europe: Out of Steam?’, 14/06/2023 https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/china-in-central-europe-out-of-steam

MERICS China Global Competition Tracker | Jacob Mardell, ‘The BRI in Pakistan: China’s flagship economic corridor’, 20/05/2020, https://merics.org/en/analysis/bri-pakistan-chinas-flagship-economic-corridor

CBEES State of the Region Report, Beril Ocakli and Benedikt Ibele, ‘Georgia’s Modern (not so Environmental) Problems. The Nature of Road and Energy Infrastructures (page 73-83), 2023, http://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1746330&dswid=8066

ZOiS Spotlight | Beril Ocakli, A Shapeshifting China in Central Asia, 31/05/2023, https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/a-shapeshifting-china-in-central-asia https://www.delink-relink.de/