The Belt and Road Initiative

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) is perhaps the largest global project of both domestic significance and global import proposed by China in the history of its interactions with the world. Since its unveiling in 2013, BRI has not only been embraced by more than 120 countries spanning across all the continents and endorsed by several dozen international NGOs including UN on one hand; it has been drawing an outcry or resistance by some big powers such as the US and India on the other hand. Why is all this occurring? What are the real intentions, real results, real potential and possible risks, and future fate of BRI? Despite the growingly enormous amount of discourse both mediated and nonmediated including thousands of think tank reports about it both in Chinese and other languages such as English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and so on, relatively little scholarship has been produced on BRI so far. However, the BRI studies could be arguably the newest China/Chinese studies and the newest area/regional/global/globalization studies all in one. Therefore, it is the goal of the present book series to advance knowledge about both China and the world from perspectives of various disciplines such as political science and economics, sociology and anthropology, communication, and so on. While proposed volumes from specific disciplines are desirable, proposed volumes on multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspectives are especially welcome in the vetting process.
This book series aim to produce both monographs and edited volumes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives such as economic science, political science, communication, sociology and anthropology, and so on and interdisciplinary/trans-disciplinary lenses such as area studies, international/intercultural, and global/globalization studies. The titles of the first few volumes include The United States Involvement in the South China Sea Dispute by MA Jianying, Ph. D. from Fudan University & Associate Professor of International Relations, Shandong Normal University, The Economics of the Belt and Road Initiative by CHEN Yongjun, Distinguished Professor of Economics, School of Business, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China, and the Belt & Road Initiative: Index Report on its Five-Dimensions Connectivity by ZHAI Kun, Professor of International Studies and Associate Dean of the Institute of Area Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China.