China's Belt and Road Initiative: Chinese Linkage and Leverage, Democratization, and Regime Change

The international liberal order steered by the US since the end of World War II and the Cold War is now being challenged by China’s economic rise as the global power shifts towards Asia. In recent years, the Western democratic paradigm encountered various setbacks with Trump’s presidency in the US, Brexit in the UK, and the rise of several populist leaders throughout Europe. This geopolitical landscape and China’s unprecedented economic growth in the past years have allowed China to take the world stage and reconfigure its position especially with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2013, China’s President launched this initiative with a focus on infrastructure development and trans-regional connectivity to enhance trade and economic cooperation for more than 64 countries across Asia, Europe, and Africa by reviving the ancient Silk Road trade routes and creating new economic corridors and maritime routes. Under BRI, China has signed 200 cooperation agreements with 138 countries, and 30 international organizations thus far. Some scholars consider BRI as a “win-win” and “China solution” to the development needs, however, others criticize China to have a neo-realist agenda to assert its power and reshape the global order. As BRI entails bilateral cooperation between the Chinese and the BRI participating government, the funding primarily comes from the China-led institutions such as the Silk Road Fund, the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) among others. With the creation of new institutions and strengthening of linkages with BRI countries through trade, investment, inter-governmental and military ties, China's influence has enhanced significantly in the region with considerable political implications. Thus, this paper not only analyzes the Chinese investment and its bilateral and multilateral practices, but it also examines its implications on the governance trajectory such as its impact on the processes of democratization and regime change in BRI countries. By using Levitsky and Way’s theoretical framework of “linkage” and “leverage”, I conceptualize and operationalize the independent variable of Chinese linkage and leverage covering the last two decades for 24 BRI countries in South, Southeast, and Central Asia. I operationalize the dependent variable by using the Liberal Democracy Index from the Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) dataset and examine any trends towards autocratization. Using panel data/time-series cross-sectional data analysis, I examine the variation in regime changes before and during the Chinese involvement and evaluate the shifts towards democracy retrenchment. Considering the socio-economic and political contextual factors, I assess if high Chinese linkage and leverage under BRI show any negative effects on democratization in the participating BRI countries.