China’s BRI: Toward Common Prosperity or New Hegemony?

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been a subject of considerable debate since its inception. Existing assessments of BRI’s implementation have often concentrated on economic or political aspects in isolation, which does not provide a comprehensive evaluation of the initiative. This paper employs a multi-dimensional approach to analyze the potential influencing factors, encompassing economic, political, military and geopolitical dimensions, from the perspectives of neoliberalism and neoclassical realism. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of BRI based on the case of Angola. The findings suggest that BRI has been highly effective in stimulating economic growth, while its impacts on politics, military, and geopolitics have been relatively limited. Although current research has not corroborated the hypothesis that China is pursuing shared prosperity, it is evident that China is following a distinct path from the United States’ quest for hegemony. The available evidence indicates that this path is moving toward the pursuit of shared prosperity.