China’s discourse on the belt and road initiative: a hidden threat to European security logic?

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the underlying meaning of Chinese political ideas as represented in the Belt and Road discourse. It aims to contribute to overcoming the bias towards democratic systems in security studies. It challenges the argument that China’s peaceful words can be taken at face value and compared with the ideas of democratic regimes. It delivers insights on new perspectives in the ‘political threat versus desecuritization’ discussion. This paper applies a qualitative discourse analysis with primary data collection of Chinese governmental and state institutional documents, Chinese think tank papers, and joint statements of EU-Chinese governmental officials. The data was analysed with NVivo Software. The empirical analysis shows that Chinese actors have built up a threat narrative idea which is hidden behind words such as ‘trust, harmony, pluralism, community of a shared destiny’. Theoretically, this paper shows that the organizing principle, to apply Buzan’s words, needs to be acknowledged when interpreting the way Chinese actors frame ideas in the BRI discourse. It challenges the argument of China as a desecuritization actor.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese political ideas
• securitization
• opposing political principles
• political threat
• Copenhagen school
• belt and road initiative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2022.2068516

Notes

1. For an in-depth description of the methodology please view appendix 1.

2. The 11 EU Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia. The 5 Balkan non-EU Member nation states are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia.