Double Transformation: China’s Green Investment in the Eastern Mediterranean

This paper analyzes how China’s green investment in the Eastern Mediterranean transforms China’s and target countries’ modes of regional engagement. China’s exponential growth and the consequent resource scarcity led the country pursue a more active foreign policy in the 21st century. This foreign policy was institutionalized in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the 2010s. BRI is a dynamic regionalization primarily based on transportation and energy infrastructure. Therefore, the project increases China’s share in global pollution and environmental degradation. China has recently developed a solution to the domestic societal effects of environmental degradation, and its failing international image as a global polluter at a time when all other major powers announced their commitment to the climate agenda. China’s green investment plan both domestically, and in the context of BRI, is a win-win game because it constitutes both a normative turn for China as a responsible major power and a source of significant economic gain because China already dominates the production and finance markets of green technology. Since the green technology supply market is dominated by non-SOEs in China, the country’s green investment in the Eastern Mediterranean forces changes in its previous mode of engagement with the region. China’s rising economic power allows it to relocate polluting technologies and force its partners to transition to sustainable technologies. China’s investments in the Eastern Mediterranean used to be heavily in transportation, but since 2015, energy has been replacing transportation as the central activity in relation to China’s changing priorities that include sustainability. The shift from transportation to energy alters China’s attitude towards regional dynamics. China builds its Eastern Mediterranean strategy on bilateral relations with selected partners instead of a region-building effort as in the case of its 17+1 strategy in Central-Eastern Europe. Contrary to the commonly accepted view in the scholarship and China’s official rhetoric, China’s decisions to build regional relations, and who to include in the China-led regional community within the BRI framework, is actually a political decision. Among the political factors China takes into consideration are domestic stability of the partner country and collective memory of bilateral relations.