Not just China: Regional actors and the Belt and Road Initiative in Pakistan, Georgia and Hungary

In the ten years since its conception, China’s Belt and Road
Initiative has morphed into a trillion dollar global infrastructure
enterprise. The attention it has been receiving is frequently mixed
with suspicion about China’s presence on the global stage. However,
any BRI project involves multiple actors beyond China and interacts
with pre-existing infrastructure and conditions. How do national
governments and elites as well as the EU perceive and utilize BRI
infrastructure projects, do they actually serve their intended
purpose and what are the outcomes for locals? Beril Ocaklı’s guests
share their insights on three specific and telling cases: Nadia Ali
on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in the Gilgit-Baltistan
region, Valentin Krüsmann on the construction of the E60 highway in
Georgia and Tamás Peragovics on the Hungarian government’s handling
of the Budapest-Belgrade railway construction. (Music: “Complete”
by Modul is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0-License.)