State-Led Development on the Belt and Road? Explaining Bureaucratic Coordination Setbacks in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

• In Event: Chinese Domestic Policy and International Challenges

Abstract

This article conceptualizes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as China’s push for top-down, state-directed development in the Global South, in which process international bureaucratic interaction and policy coordination are crucial. However, research into this aspect of the BRI is scant, as empirical attention tends to focus on specific high-profile projects. This article remedies the BRI literature’s neglect of international bureaucratic coordination under the BRI with a case study of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), under which both countries have established a bureaucratic coordination mechanism that is more elaborate than in any other BRI bilateral cooperation. Drawing on fieldwork to Pakistan and other elite interviews, this paper examines the drafting of the long-term plan, the implementation of the first and second phases of the CPEC since its launch in 2013. It identifies three key issues in the bureaucratic coordination mechanism in China’s cooperation with Pakistan: the bureaucracy’s lack of autonomy from domestic politics, the lack of two-way communication mechanisms with the business sectors, and the asymmetry of bureaucratic capacity between the two countries which led to dissonance in program implementation. These issues are likely not specific to the CPEC but more general in China’s BRI cooperation, thus calling into question the BRI’s potential to deliver transformative developmental results.

Author

• Hong Zhang, Indiana University Bloomington