Abstract
This paper examines how China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has reshaped institutional connectivity, business networks, supply-chain integration, and capital deployment across Global Asia. Existing studies have interpreted the BRI as a grand strategic project of regional ordering (Rolland, 2017), a fragmented process shaped by multiple Chinese state and commercial actors (Jones and Hameiri, 2019), or a channel of development finance, investment, and construction (Dreher et al., 2022; Lin et al., 2025). Yet we know less about how formal institutional engagement with host states corresponds to the geography of Chinese investment and construction, and whether these two dimensions of the BRI follow the same political-economic logic.
Addressing this question, the paper develops an integrated empirical analysis of BRI engagement in Asia. It combines an original dataset measuring the depth of China’s formal BRI engagement across 152 host states from 2013 to 2025 and deal-level investment and construction data from the AEI China Global Investment Tracker. While the broader analytical framework treats institutionalised connectivity as encompassing formal cooperation, business networks, and supply-chain linkages, the empirical analysis focuses on the relationship between formal engagement depth and capital deployment. The analysis covers a country-year panel of 29 Asian states from 2013 to 2023, linking variation in formal engagement depth to patterns of Chinese capital deployment across countries, years, and sectors.
The paper asks: when does institutionalised BRI engagement translate into investment and construction activity, and when do the two diverge? Preliminary evidence suggests that formal engagement depth and capital allocation are only weakly coupled (r = 0.12 across countries). Countries with deeper BRI engagement tend to receive more Chinese investment and construction in cross-sectional terms, but fixed-effects estimates indicate that within-country changes in capital deployment are driven more consistently by economic capacity, especially GDP per capita, than by changes in engagement depth. The paper advances the concept of institutionalised connectivity to explain China’s regional presence in Asia as a layered process in which formal institutional engagement and capital deployment interact through distinct, partially independent logics.
