Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on regional stability in South Asia

ABSTRACT

By focusing on domestic and geopolitical factors, this study aims to understand the impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on regional stability in South Asia. It critically examines China’s investments in Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to understand how that impacts local economies and politics as well as the geopolitical climate considering the rivalry between China and India. As China seeks to promote alternatives for its partners to decrease their dependence on India and India-dominated institutions, there appears to be a negative impact of the geostrategic competition between China and India on South Asian regionalism. China’s economic influence varies and the evidence from Sri Lanka and Pakistan suggests that Beijing fully controls the deep seaports that it has built through BRI. While Beijing has engaged with a variety of political actors in the selected countries, it has not tried to influence domestic politics.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• South Asia
• Belt and Road Initiative
• regional stability and geopolitics

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial and editorial support provided by Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 First established in 2007, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad is a group of four countries involving India, Australia, Japan and the United States.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahid Shahab Ahmed

Zahid Shahab Ahmed is Research Fellow at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizen and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies. He is author of Regionalism and Regional Security in South Asia: The Role of SAARC (Routledge, 2016).

Md Ziaul Haque Sheikh

Md Ziaul Haque Sheikh is an Associate Professor in the department of Islamic History and Culture at the Jagannath University, Dhaka. He completed his PhD from the South Asian University, New Delhi.