Geo-Economic Linkages between China and the Countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road and Their Types

With the advances of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the geo-economic interactions between China and countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road counties (MSRCs) continue to increase, and analyzing the geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs is extremely important for a scientific understanding of bilateral geo-economic cooperation. Differently from the traditional logic of geo-economic competition and cooperation, we constructed a new framework based on the dominant factors of geo-economic relations and used an extreme random forest regression model to classify the geo-economic relation types between China and MSRCs from 2006 to 2017. The results show that the unbalanced development of investment and trade between China and MSRCs hindered the enhancement of the intensity of bilateral geo-economic linkage from 2006 to 2017. The “Matthew effect” of China’s geo-economic flow linkage with MSRCs is significant. There are obvious differences in the dominant factors affecting the types of geo-economic relations between China and MSRCs, and the distribution of the importance of the indices of the types of geo-economic relations in each country is disordered. Geopolitics, markets, and resources have played important roles in the geo-economic linkages between China and MSRCs. There are five types of geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs: market-oriented type, resource-oriented type, market-resource-oriented type, market-geopolitics-oriented type, and resource-geopolitics-oriented type, of which the market-oriented type is the most important type of geo-economic relations. In the future, China should focus on regional powers along the Maritime Silk Road for bilateral geo-economic cooperation, actively promote the balanced development of bilateral geo-economic elements flows, strengthen geopolitical cooperation with MSRCs, and formulate cooperation plans according to the types of geo-economic relations.