All Roads Lead to Beijing: Systemism, Power Transition Theory and the Belt and Road Initiative

Since its launch in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) quickly has become the cornerstone of foreign policy for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Xi Jinping’s leadership to project China’s new-found economic influence through networks of infrastructure, trade, and investment deals. Considerable scholarship about the BRI has focused on China’s motivations, domestic politics, strategic culture, policy instruments, and the perceptions, effects, and implications across various countries and regions. While competing IR paradigms and levels of analysis have been applied to analyze the BRI and its impact, little research has examined the complex causal mechanisms of the BRI in a comprehensively visualized and rigorous way. How, for example, does the BRI look in the context of power transition theory? Is this time-honored theory, which focuses on the dynamics of capabilities, able to explain the characteristics of BRI, notably its impact upon policies and outcomes at the regional and international levels? Through the prism of systemism, this paper seeks to answer such questions. The systemist approach, which emphasizes the graphic portrayal of cause and effect, is well suited to the task of comparing and evaluating theoretical arguments about developments such as the BRI. A visualization of power transition theory is used to obtain insights about the likely direction of China’s BRI in terms of the USA and China as leading states and rivals faced with the challenge of managing conflict short of war in East Asia.