Grand Development Strategy or Simply Grandiose? China's Diffusion of Its Belt & Road Initiative into Central Europe

ABSTRACT

Since the launching of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Chinese leaders have sought to diffuse this ambitious overseas infrastructure drive into the Central and Eastern European bloc. From the literature on policy diffusion, we refer here to a process whereby a dominant actor (China) has vigorously promoted a particular strand of its own domestic development policy in other emerging economies. Our focus is on the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, all EU members since 2004. We draw on Etel Solingen's (2012. Of dominoes and firewalls: the domestic, regional, and global politics of international diffusion. International Studies Quarterly, 56 (4), 631–644) seminal framework on policy diffusion, which considers the stimulus, the medium, political agents, and outcomes. It is the dearth of BRI loans and China-backed infrastructure projects in this sub-region that we seek to explain. Our main finding is that China has been its own biggest firewall in the diffusion of BRI into Central Europe. China needs to formulate policies that surpass the pursuit of its own economic interests and devise approaches that resonate with the more developed status of these three Central European countries.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Belt and Road Initiative
• Czech Republic
• Hungary
• Poland
• European Union

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The authors thank Deborah Brautigam, Sarah Eaton, Matt Ferchen, Stephan Haggard, Emilian Kalvalski, and Saori Katada for their constructive comments on earlier drafts. They also acknowledge the generous funding for travel and research received from Masaryk University and from the Center for International Studies at USC.

2 Off-the-record remark made to Wise over lunch with a Chinese colleague in Beijing.

3 Data on per capita GDP are available from https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/.

4 We thank USC students Chenyan Zhou and Claire He for assisting us so ably with a search of Mandarin language historical archives in China, which we draw on here.

5 Data annex referred in the text is available here: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/hvcxg836fv/1.

6 Detail on this new EU Foreign Direct Investment Regulation is available from https://www.bakermckenzie.com/en/insight/publications/2020/10/eu-foreign-investment-mechanism.

7 In 2013, both Hungary and Poland ranked as ‘Consolidated Democracies’ on the widely used Freedom House Index. In 2020, Poland was downgraded to a ‘Semi-Consolidated Democracy’ and Hungary plummeted to a ‘Transitional/Hybrid Regime.’ The CR is ranked as the most Consolidated Democracy in this database. Available from https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2020/dropping-democratic-facade.

8 We thank David Somogyi, USC doctoral candidate in political science and international relations, for his superb summary of Hungarian language sources.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oldrich Krpec

Oldrich Krpec Associate Professor, International Relations department, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. With a focus on economic history and international political economy, Krpec has written widely on economic policies in the semi-periphery and the projection of power into trade and development policies. Krpec's current work concerns the foreign economic policies of the Central European countries, Chinese economic expansion into Central Europe and a comparison of developmental policies in Central Europe and Latin America.

Carol Wise

Carol Wise Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California. Wise is most recently the author of Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out) on China's International Development Strategy (Yale University Press, 2020). She has written widely on trade, finance and institutional development in the Pacific Basin countries. In 2019, Wise held the Fulbright-Masaryk University Distinguished Chair, Department of International Relations, Brno, Czech Republic.