The Chinese leadership announced the China Goes Global strategy (CGG) in 2000, an announcement followed by extensive publicity and mobilization campaigns inside the country. At the time, however, foreign observers were preoccupied with China’s pending admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and paid little attention to the CGG. It was only in the mid-2000s, when Chinese outbound investment rapidly increased, did the strategy begin to generate interest, debate, and serious discussion abroad. Scholarly research on China’s outbound investment has since adopted three approaches: the economic statecraft framework that underscores the Chinese government using economic means to achieve diplomatic goals; the state capitalism model that focuses on powerful SOEs shaping the country’s foreign policy for their own commercial interests; and finally, a world development approach that asks whether Chinese outgoing capital helps or hinders industrialization in underdeveloped regions.

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.