Two Projections of the Belt and Road: Mapping to Itself and to the World

Abstract Beijing maintains two versions of the Belt and Road, one for audiences inside China and one for audiences beyond it. Whether the two differ in a structured way is the question answered here. The study recovers the boundary of Belt and Road space from the BRI Portal ecosystem by separating the internal, Chinese-language projection from the outward projection in English, Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish, with the source architecture held constant and only the audience varied. Country prominence is measured with a composite index over project counts, sectoral breadth, hard-connectivity share and path dependence, tested by scaling to GDP, re-weighting, a coverage-matched null and portal decomposition, and validated against AidData's record of Chinese official finance. The two projections correlate at Spearman ρ = 0.61 and do not coincide. Outward materials give Southeast Asian operational weight over to North African and CIS visibility, amplify Egypt and the Gulf, and damp Indonesia, the most deeply embedded host in the internal corpus, in all five outward languages. Portal prominence still tracks the financial scale of documented engagement (ρ = 0.60 across 125 mutually confirmed hosts, about 0.43 net of economy size). Beijing's official cartography of the Belt and Road is therefore two maps with a structured divergence between them. The maps give the regionalism literature's graded conception of regional formation an operational footing, supply a replicable boundary of officially represented BRI space in place of inherited country lists, and carry a dual-projection method portable to any regional project whose membership is politically constructed.