Democratic Backsliding & Institutional Adaptation on China's Belt and Road

• In Event: Democracy and Foreign Policy

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) proposes a wide-ranging global network of infrastructure and development projects. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s flagship economic program has the potential to reshape international politics and the regional economic order. However, aside from buzzy headlines and Western allegations of debt-trap diplomacy, the BRI is woefully understudied. This paper uses semi-structured interviews, collected from 151 Southeast and South Asian bureaucratic elites over the past three years, to analyze the impact of autocratic economic statecraft on young democratic systems.

This project generates novel elite opinion data from Southeast and South Asian bureaucratic elites towards Chinese investment and its political impacts. This research presents empirical evidence of democratic backsliding and institutional adaptation in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. This project also sketches a clearer picture of the political impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on recipient states and its potential effects on the liberal international order. This novel data directly contributes to the scholarly literature on Chinese foreign policy, democratic backsliding, and the field of economic statecraft.

Author

• Merlin Boone, United States Military Academy