China, BRI,Strategic Comp

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor

The course will examine the BRI in the larger framework of China’s foreign policy and strategic concepts and objectives, including the “Community of Common Destiny” and President Xi’s “New Asian Security Concept,” which casts BRI as a policy “means” to a larger strategic “end.” The course will begin by setting BRI in the context of China’s domestic development and the key drivers that have shaped its economic evolution. It will go on to evaluate how China’s global BRI activities have affected the interests of states participating in BRI projects as well as the interests of the U.S., its allies, and its strategic partners, especially in the Indo-Pacific region. It will also consider BRI’s expansion beyond the Indo-Pacific into the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Arctic again assessing its impact on U.S. strategic interests in those regions The course will lay out the evolution of competing visions of regional and international order, in particular the concept of a Free and Open-Indo Pacific (FOIP). Inspired in Japan initially, then-President Trump, in remarks to the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam in November 2017, set out his vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP). In the context of Sino-American competition, the course will compare the economic and security elements of FOIP and the BRI in terms of support for regional economic development, stability, and security. Finally, the course will ask students to define an appropriate U.S. policy response to the BRI.