Ambitious strategies launched by the political leadership, such as the WDP, CGG, and BRI, mobilized local governments to implement them in their jurisdictions. Local governments, however, drawing on the strategies ambiguity, improvise projects and program that often diverge from the rhetoric at the strategies and yet conform to their local economic needs. It is in this process of subnational reinterpretation that proclaimed nationalist intent in the strategies is replaced by economic imperatives in the localities. This chapter investigates three cities – Chongqing, Ningbo, and Wenzhou – to evaluate local reinterpretation, diverse implementation, and economic effects in local development, realized and ongoing.

Companies, private and state-owned, are the main commercial actors, employers, and revenue generators in China; they are of central concern in studies of China and globalization. How they approach nationalist strategies sheds light on the nature of Chinese capitalism, the characteristics of business–government interactions, and the prospect – distant or otherwise – of political liberalization in China. China specialists have conducted in-depth research on corporate behaviors in 1990s China, including Bruce Dickson’s surveys on “red capitalists,” Kellee Tsai’s informal adaptation of private capital, and Scott Kennedy’s work on business lobbying across different sectors. In the new millennium, political studies seemed to focus less on companies, while burgeoning business studies have primarily concerned themselves with technology and management issues.

In 2012–2013, the Chinese state was in a state of crisis. It had just experienced a political storm in relation to the abrupt downfall of political giant Bo Xilai, who had built a formidable power base and political movement in western China. Newly minted president Xi Jinping forced an aggressive anticorruption campaign that targeted incumbent state officials. There were widespread economic troubles, with shrinking exports, loss-making state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and industrial overcapacities. On top of all this, America’s diplomatic “encirclement” of China was succeeding – the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) had signatures from twelve major economies in the Asia Pacific region, and China was being excluded. Facing these challenges, Chinese officials and state-affiliated researchers were concerned and gloomy. They had workable proposals to address these challenges; but none of them, in 2012–2013, gained enough traction to rally cross-agency support and societal approval.

President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road in late 2013. By late 2018, dozens – if not hundreds – of related volumes were on sale in the Amazon marketplace, many of which were produced by long-term observers of China or global politics. Representing different disciplines and national interests, they invariably portray the BRI as the “centerpiece” of China’s strategy to project power abroad. Robert Kaplan predicts that the new Silk Road will propel China’s return to dominance. Tom Miller also paints a picture of a future world in which global power shifts from Anglo-Saxon capitals to Beijing. In Central, South, and Southeast Asia, strategic observers have been concerned about China’s expansion at the expense of the existing order. From a regional perspective, Nadege Rolland examines the BRI’s political and strategic implications in Eurasia.

In 1998, Communist China was trapped in crises. The Asian financial crisis precipitated sharp falls in incoming foreign investment and outgoing exports in China; violent protests against the United States brought Sino–American relations to near a halt; nationwide crackdowns on the religious movement Falun Gong pitted the state against its own society. Deng Xiaoping had just passed away a year earlier. Against this backdrop, Beijing’s decision to join the World Trade Organization was almost like “raising a white flag”; both liberals and conservative members of the ruling elite felt that “doomsday” was near. People of that era could not have expected that the Chinese economy could go so far so fast.

The SMG analysis has established that the WDP, like the BRI and CGG, was launched by the political leadership, who were facing economic recession and other challenges, and then mobilized subnational and commercial actors to improvise growth-reviving endeavors in their own purviews. This chapter focuses on three tasks: First, it presents the reform-era developmental history of western China and captures how the WDP and globalization have interacted in this region; second, it elaborates on the process and phases of WDP implementation and explains how state roles have adapted to different periods of developmental challenges in the country; and finally, it uses three large infrastructure projects in the WDP as examples to illustrate that, while expanding globalization, the WDP’s implementation has also intensified centralization and political penetration by the ruling party into inland China.

China has an authoritarian political system, with the political leadership concentrating major powers at the apex of the regime. China also has a state-controlled economic system, in which the state owns the financial resources and largest companies, as well as powerful local governments. Under this political–economic system, when a political leader announces an ambitious strategy to expand Chinese influence abroad, it is natural for observers to conclude that this strategy will cohesively pursue the autocrat’s expansionist aims.