Infrastructure as Influence: The Strategic Logic Behind China’s Overseas Port Network
In the autumn of 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a strategic effort to connect economies through infrastructure, marking a significant shift in global trade and geopolitics. He called for an innovative approach to construct an economic belt along the Silk Road . This vision would soon encompass not only overland paths but also maritime corridors spanning oceans. A month later, in Indonesia , Xi extended this framework, proposing a twenty-first-century Maritime Silk Road . These pronouncements marked the formal inception of what became known as the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast endeavor to knit together economies through infrastructure, with ports emerging as pivotal nodes in this expanding web. By 2018, the initiative had already transformed sleepy coastal outposts into bustling gateways, such as the deep-water port in Sri Lanka 's Hambantota , funded by Chinese loans totaling around $1.5 billion. That facility, intended to bols...
