China’s Maritime Silk Road

Book excerpt: This innovative book examines the maritime component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), focusing on three key trade routes and addressing the question of how China protects its overseas assets. Gerald Chan explores China’s rising maritime power, using geo-developmentalism as a theoretical framework to analyse the country’s development of port facilities and infrastructure along important trade routes. Through developing these sea routes, he argues that a new global order is in the making.