South Korea's response to the BRI

Abstract

The growing impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on world politics and economics has sparked growing interest and debate regarding how the Republic of Korea (South Korea) should respond to the BRI. However, how South Korea has actually dealt with the BRI remains somewhat unclear. To fill the gap in the literature, this chapter examines South Korea’s response to the BRI. Since 2013, the South Korean government has sought to link its own connectivity initiatives to the BRI through diplomacy at the summit and other levels of government contact. However, South Korea has made deliberately ambiguous responses to the BRI since 2018, after President Trump called for the cooperation for the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy in 2017. Consequently, the South Korean government adopted a hedging approach not to choose either the BRI or the FOIP strategy, but to cooperate with both. Even after the confrontation between the United States and China has escalated after the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korea has maintained the approach. This chapter explains this by pointing to how three factors—South Korea’s middle power status, the ROK–US Alliance, and confrontation between the United States and China—have conditioned South Korea’s response to the BRI.