What determines global sentiment towards China’s Belt and Road Initiative?

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one of the most important geopolitical phenomena of this century. It signals China’s increasing clout overseas while focussing on trade links and infrastructure in general. An important question which has not yet been fully answered is how different countries perceive this initiative, whether they are part of it or not. To answer this question, a large media repository, GDELT, is used to assess each country’s perceptions of the BRI and how they evolve over time. The main finding is that global sentiment on the BRI deteriorated significantly in most geographies from 2017 to 2022, although generally still in positive territory. Further, an empirical analysis is conducted to test the relationship between individual countries’ sentiment towards the BRI and three possible determinants, i.e. economic linkages with China, geopolitical closeness with China, and a country’s perceptions and attitudes about some China-related issues. The results suggest that import dependence on China seems to worsen the image of the BRI. Instead, a country’s geopolitical alignment with China, whether by being a member of the BRI or by voting at the United Nations (UN) like China, is positively correlated with its perceptions of the BRI.