Markets, Money and Might: Chinese Economic Statecraft and a Case Study of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Economic statecraft is a state’s deliberate manipulation of economic interaction or deployment of economic resources to defend its national interests and further its strategic goals. The practice of economic statecraft on a globally significant scale is changing both the nature of diplomacy and the logic and operation of markets. Some contend that the introduction of geopolitical logic into commercial deals render once-distinct security and economic considerations harder to disentangle, raising the risk that disagreements in one field can trigger a reaction in another. China has often been described as the world’s leading practitioner in geoeconomics. The increasing and diversified incidences of the use of economic statecraft as China’s tool of influence in the game of international politics, coupled with the lack of clarity and underlying mistrust regarding the current and future intentions and capabilities of this rising power, have prompted allegations that these less conventional shows of national strength are aimed at potentially upending the extant international order and have stoked concerns that these acts could undermine the laws and norms governing the conduct of international relations. Some of these allegations and concerns are legitimate, some misguided, and others overdrawn. It is, therefore, the modest aim of this thesis to lend some perspective to these concerns. With a view to analytically separate speculation from substance, this thesis assesses several of these claims in the specific context of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road or Maritime Silk Road Initiative (“MSRI”). As one of China’s foremost displays of economic statecraft, the MSRI provides an important empirical arena in which to observe the interplay between strategic and economic considerations, and serves as a bellwether for the successes and limits of the tools of economic statecraft.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | [ca. August 2019] |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Sum, Grace Jia En |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Miller, Alice |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | Chinese foreign policy |
| Subject | Chinese law |
| Subject | Belt and Road Initiative |
| Subject | state-business relations |
| Subject | port governance |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- 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 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Sum, Grace Jia En. (2019). Markets, Money and Might: Chinese Economic Statecraft and a Case Study of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/xb855hb3185
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- gracesum@stanford.edu
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