Hong Zhang, Thomas Christensen

Conceptualizing China’s increasingly active development outreach through the Belt and Road Initiative as the internationalization of China’s “developmental statecraft,” I argue that the central goal of this process is to induce alignment of state-directed development agendas in the partnering countries with China’s own, and to coordinate international collective actions toward the construction of a China-centered economic network. Such an economic grand strategy is informed by China’s own developmental state experience. Through a close examination of how the developmental state bureaucracy operationalizes the BRI in the period of 2013-2020, and a crucial case of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, I demonstrate that such “craft” involves extensive use of planning, corporatist mechanisms for interest aggregation, and platform-building. The dissecting analysis goes beyond the usual sketchy description of economic statecraft tools discussed in the literature. Effecti