The Belt Road and Beyond: State Mobilized Globalization in China, 1998–2018 Min Ye. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 240 pp. £89.00; $105.00 (hbk). ISBN 9781108479561 - One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World Eyck Fr

Amid the torrent of books and articles on China's much-publicized and now much-studied yidai yilu (Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] / One Belt One Road Initiative [OBOR]), these are two must-haves on the shelves for all who claim either expertise or simply passing interest in China's outward bound "project of the century."Both books are exhaustively researched, both are eminently readable, and each takes up a fundamentally different perspective on the BRI/OBOR.Min Ye considers the BRI from the inside out; Eyck Freymann from the outside in.Each in its own way significantly contributes to the ever-expanding literature on China's engagement with the developing world.Min Ye's The Belt Road and Beyond is a thoughtful, framework-heavy and academic monograph that seeks to explain the all-important hows of the BRI, and not surprisingly she is largely focused on the domestic drivers of the initiative, locating the repertoires and activities of the BRI within China itself.She proposes a framework she calls "State-Mobilized Globalization (SMG)," whose core elements consist of the internal policy fragmentation of the Party-state in a "system that consists of political leaders, national bureaucracies, local governments, and SOEs in a complex and interactive web of roles and relationships" (p.11).To this fragmentation is added a campaign style of political mobilization and globalization, the latter especially important because globalization and outward investment has been so essential for continued economic growth, and a continued high rate of economic growth has been the sine qua non for continued Party legitimacy in a system that taxes growth rather than income.Ye then turns her keen analysis to some 15 years of globalization-oriented industrial policy prior to the launch of the BRI: the Western Development Policy (chapter three), China's Going Global Policy (chapter four), and only then the announcement of the BRI, which significantly drew much of its inspiration and models from the prior two initiatives.Indeed, Ye points to the ways in which BRI's signature repertoire of investment in infrastructures was first practised inside China with hefty infusions of investment for stalled rail projects (pp.139-141).Chapter six describes local variation in three cities: Chongqing, Ningbo and Wenzhou.Within the same national framework that privileged markets and opening up, local leaders have attempted to leverage their geographical, technocratic and economic profiles in ways that demonstrate how easily local implementers could and did reframe SMG in the light of their own interests, with significant