Since the 1990s, researchers, commentators and politicians have been asking the question “What does China want?” What are China's ambitions and goals, given its dramatic ascendance as an economic superpower? And is its “peaceful rise” possible? (Segal 1999; Johnston 2003; Buzan 2010; Brown 2017). Following the collapse of the USSR, the first version of the “China Threat scenario” emerged among US conservative policy circles, but China's increasing openness after Tiananmen, culminating in its 2001 entry into the WTO, rendered it irrelevant until the end of the Hu- Wen era.

The 2010s, however, witnessed an increasing alarmism about the rapidly expanding presence of Chinese economic actors globally. When US anxiety focused mainly on the military and political rise of China, its seemingly capitalist economy had provided a much- needed tonic to calm the nerves. But now a more robust rearticulation of the China Threat idea stated that Chinese activities in the economic field also hide malicious intentions. Under this prism, the BRI is seen as the economic pillar of Xi Jinping's grand strategy to reshape the global balance of power to China's favour. The group supporting this view could not be more diverse, including voices from the left, centre, right and far- right of the political spectrum.

Is the BRI really a strategy, perhaps even a “grand” one? Can it reveal to us China's plans and intentions? We will confront this question by starting from the notion of “grand strategy” itself. The study of “grand strategy” can help analyze a country's intentions by taking a step back and getting a more holistic perspective on whether a unified picture exists or not, thereby linking together different pieces of the puzzle. However, the idea of a grand strategy can also act as a lens that distorts reality to provide justification for a certain policy preference. Think, for instance, about the Cold War era “domino theory”, which assumed that the USSR's grand strategy was to export revolution to different parts of the world and set up puppet regimes controlled by Moscow. This assumption distorted the nature of anticolonial struggles in places such as Vietnam and provided the rationale for the US military intervention.