The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order

An exploration of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to reshape international order and how it has catalyzed a new era of infrastructural geopolitics

Over the past decade China has put infrastructural and urban development at the heart of a strategy aimed at nothing less than the transformation of international order. The Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to revitalize and reconnect the ancient Silk Roads that linked much of the world before the rise of the West, is an attempt to place China at the center of this new international order, one shaped by Chinese power, norms, and values. It seeks to do so, in part, by shaping our shared urban future.

Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus explore how China’s specific investments in urban development--cities, roads, railways, ports, digital and energy connectivity--are directly linked to its foreign policy goals. Curtis and Klaus examine the implications of these developments as they evolve across the vast Afro-Eurasian region.

The distinctive model of international order and urban life emerging with the rise of Chinese power and influence offers a potential rival to the one that has accompanied the rise and zenith of Western power, marking a new age of infrastructural geopolitics and Great Power competition.

Simon Curtis is associate professor in international relations at the University of Surrey and senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. His other books include Global Cities and Global Order. He lives in Surrey, UK. Ian Klaus is founding director of Carnegie California and former senior adviser for global cities at the US Department of State. His other books include Forging Capitalism. He lives in California.