"A New Kind Of Belt And Road Initiative After The Pandemic" - By upcoming CWP Fellow Eyck Freymann
Since President Xi announced China’s grand strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, in Kazakhstan in 2013, it has grown so much in geographic and conceptual scope that it has become difficult to measure. Agreements setting out some form of formal affiliation with the initiative have been signed with 146 countries. Meanwhile, the projects covered by this grand strategy have increased in number but also in terms of sectoral and geographic complexity, from the Arctic to the deep oceans, from Latin America to outer space.
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has been a major complication for the BRI. Since January 2020, China has closed its borders to the world, cutting off most in-person exchanges and crippling businesses’ ability to evaluate, negotiate and conclude new deals (Figures 1 and 2).
BY: ALICIA GARCÍA-HERRERO AND EYCK FREYMANN DATE: JUNE 23, 2022 TOPIC: GLOBAL ECONOMY AND TRADE -
https://www.bruegel.org/2022/06/a-new-kind-of-belt-and-road-initiative-after-the-pandemic/
Eyck Freymann is a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.
In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.
Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. As a reporter and columnist for The Wire China, he is the author of “The Warming War,” a series of investigative reports about the breakdown in climate diplomacy and its implications for the planet and global security.
Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/julientromeur-3630051/
