On November 9, the Committee on International Trade of the European Parliament organized a hearing on EU-China Trade and Investment Relations in a post-covid world. Andreea Brînză, Vice President of RISAP, was one of the European experts invited to testify at this hearing. In her testimony, Andreea presented an overview of China’s Belt and [...]
It’s difficult to think of a more famous piece of off-the-mark but still common wisdom about China than the idea that China’s government thinks and plans in generations, decades, or centuries, acting in its long-term interest. Today, especially in foreign affairs, China often lacks a long-term vision, while its short-term actions are sabotaging its [...]
Some years ago, both President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang showed a fondness for referencing popular American television shows including “Game of Thrones” and “House of Cards.” While they seen to display a firm grasp on Western pop culture, they seem to lack a thorough understanding of European politics. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang [...]
In November 2013, at the Bucharest Summit of the 16+1 initiative, China, Hungary, and Serbia talked about building a high-speed railway that would connect Belgrade to Budapest (respectively the capitals of Serbia and Hungary). The announcement happened just one month after Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and [...]
As the novel coronavirus spread from country to country, reaching the level of a pandemic, some voices pointed toward the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the main avenue of contagion. But had it been better implemented, the BRI could instead have been lauded as a champion of pandemic prevention. Many people may not [...]
When the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949, almost 40 years had passed since China’s territory had last been administered by a functional central government, the Qing Dynasty. This period of chaos and war affected hundreds of millions of lives. In 1949, life expectancy at birth in China was only somewhere between [...]
As even Chinese President Xi Jinping has realized, the Belt and Road Initiative has to find a new groove. The BRI has come under harsh criticism over the past year, amid the heat of national election campaigns in countries such as Malaysia and the Maldives and accusations of China pushing states into excessive borrowing. [...]
Seven years ago, in 2012, when China announced it wanted to build an ecological civilisation, it was hard to take it seriously. The concept sounded good, but it was too much to hope for from the world’s biggest polluter. A year later, China launched the “Belt and Road Initiative” and, ever since, all [...]
A route that spans around Eurasia, an infrastructure project that encompasses over 70 countries, a branding strategy, are just some of the ways in which the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been described until now. But the narrative has begun to change lately. From a beneficial strategy, the BRI has become a bogeyman [...]
The benign depiction of the Belt and Road Initiative as a New Silk Road or a Marshall Plan, or even as a project aiming to aid developing countries, seems to be a thing of the past. A negative narrative has taken over, depicting the belt and road as a risky initiative that may burden [...]