"The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s Pursuit of Agenda-Setting Power" - by CWP alum Dalton Lin

The US-led, rules-based order enables China to pursue a peaceful international power transition by leveraging the agenda-setting power. The agenda that China proposes is development, and the lever to promote the agenda is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI helps China publicize the development agenda, co-opt the existing US-led system, showcase China’s material success, legitimize its creation of new international institutions, and attract supporters of its calls to revise the current US-led order. Since Washington wants to avoid its competition with China turning apocalyptic, the most sensible US countermeasure is keeping China inside this rules-based order and competing to set its agenda.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0030438723000376?dgcid=author

Dalton Lin is a political scientist specializing in theories of international relations and foreign policy. His research interests focus on theorizing the bargaining between major and lesser countries in international politics, with an area focus on China and East Asia. He is a research associate with the China Research Center and founder of the Taiwan Security Issues. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Photo Credit: By Owennson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78386561