One Belt, One Road, One Story?

This book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is refracted through relations with third parties. The volume brings together scholars from China and Europe in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, EU studies, and strategic communication. The empirical focus cuts across policy, publics and media, and across history, political economy and diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the other policy areas addressed in the chapters, offers ways for people in Europe and China to get to know one another in new ways, and for the EU and its member states and the Chinese state to forge new partnerships. 

This book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is refracted through relations with third parties. The volume brings together scholars from China and Europe in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, EU studies, and strategic communication. The empirical focus cuts across policy, publics and media, and across history, political economy and diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the other policy areas addressed in the chapters, offers ways for people in Europe and China to get to know one another in new ways, and for the EU and its member states and the Chinese state to forge new partnerships. 

Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Zeng: Introduction.- Part I: Shaping Narratives: Contexts for Alignment.- Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin (Queen’s University Belfast and Royal Holloway, University of London): The EU’s struggle for a strategic narrative on China.- Liu Chunrong, (Fudan University): Framing China-EU Sub-regional Cooperation: The Elusive Pursuit of Normative Resonance?.  Shi Zhiqin and Vasilis Trigkas (Tsinghua University), Reconstructing Geography, Power and Politics in the Belt & Road Initiative.-  Zhenyan Xi (Sichuan University) – The Assessment of China’s Economic Rise and Its Strategic Narrative in Europe.- Part II: Measuring Narratives: Analytical Tool of Perceptions.- Jinghan Zeng (Royal Holloway): The role of Europe in Chinese strategic narratives: “Belt and Road Initiative” and “New Type of Great Power relations”.- Junchi Ma (Institute for European Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences): The paradoxes between narrator and audience in the China’s narrative of Belt and Road Initiative.- Li Zhang (Tsinghua University)- China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the European Media: A Mixed Narrative?.- Feng Zhongping and Huang Jing (China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations), Chinese strategic narratives of Europe since the European debt crisis.- Floor Keuleers (Leuven): Choosing the Better Devil: Reception of EU and Chinese Narratives on Development by South African University Students.- Carolijn van Noort (Otago/UWE): Visual Analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative: The Securing of a Regional Geopolitical Order, China’s Identity, and Infrastructure Development Narratives.- Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Zeng: Conclusions.