Back on Track: Thailand's High-Speed Rail within China's Belt and Road Initiative
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global development strategy involving infrastructure projects worth over one trillion USD. For the People’s Republic of China (PRC), opaque negotiations are the norm and result in deals that must use Chinese financing, Chinese workers, and Chinese materials, and in exchange, the host country receives infrastructure development. The “win-win” scenario provides countries that are short on technical expertise and financial resources the means to develop infrastructure and leaves the PRC obtaining a strategic resource. This study focuses on how Thailand broke away from high-speed rail (HSR) negotiations with China and forged a new path forward in BRI project implementation. Thailand is the first BRI country in which Beijing has permitted the host county to self-fund the project, train the host country's engineers, forgo the use of Chinese workers for local Thai contractors, utilize Thai materials, and transfer HSR technology to the host country. The study answers questions such as, why did the PRC make huge concessions to Thailand? How can middle-power countries develop agency in relation to China? What structural changes did Thailand implement in order to self-fund and assume control of a HSR project? And what lessons from this case can be extracted and used by other less powerful countries within BRI? The research method involves a qualitative approach that draws on open-source information from across the Thai government. The study coalesces and analyzes stove-piped information that contributes to the broader BRI literature that less powerful states can devise financial alternatives to lessen their reliance on Chinese financing.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | January 31, 2022 - December 1, 2022 |
| Publication date | December 9, 2022; December 8, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Petermann, Wolfgang |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Emmerson, Donald |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies |
Subjects
| Subject | Belt and Road Initiative |
|---|---|
| Subject | China |
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | High-Speed Rail |
| Subject | Public-Private Partnership |
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
| Subject | Thailand |
| Subject | Turkey |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Petermann, Wolfgang. (2022). Back on Track: Thailand's High-Speed Rail within China's Belt and Road Initiative. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/dv066kf5511. https://doi.org/10.25740/dv066kf5511.
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- wpetermann2@gmail.com
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