Ye Publishes Journal Article on Belt and Road Initiative
Min Ye, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School, published a recent journal article examining the domestic politics behind the Belt and Road Initiative in China.
Ye’s article, entitled “Fragmentation and Mobilization: Domestic Politics of the Belt and Road in China,” was published in the Journal of Contemporary China on February 26, 2019.
From the text of the abstract:
The Belt and Road initiative is five years old and has resulted in voluminous publications by scholars and policy pundits in many corners of the world. It is by far the most watched foreign policy initiative that the PRC has projected on the world stage. Departing from the standard focus on BRI’s external ambition, this article investigates the political dynamics inside the Chinese state, which has driven and will continue to shape the contour and magnitude of the BRI in the future. The article builds a theory of state fragmentation and argues that the Belt and Road is a mobilization campaign by the Communist leadership in order to deal with domestic and diplomatic challenges. Mobilization, however, intensifies fragmentation and results in the decentralized implementation of the BRI that diverges from the rhetoric of the strategy. Lower-level governments and major business groups leverage on the BRI and devise projects and programs that serve their economic interests. On the one hand, economic growth is being revived in the localities; on the other, restructuring and rebalancing of the Chinese economy are delayed.
Min Ye is the author of Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2010). Her articles, “China’s Outbound Direct Investment: Regulation and Representation,” “Competing Cooperation in Asia Pacific: TPP, RCEP, and the New Silk Road,” and “Conditions and Utility of Diffusion by Diasporas” have appeared in Modern China Studies (2013), Journal of Asian Security (2015), and Journal of East Asian Studies (2016).