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Chinese actors have emerged as major funders and developers of large-scale transnational infrastructure projects in Europe and beyond. Despite this profound shift, geographers have not yet arrived at a clear conceptualisation of such projects. We show how the literature is overly reliant on a functional view of the Chinese state, structural economic factors, single case studies, and bilateral relations, generating monocausal explanations of outcomes. We develop a new conceptual framework emphasising variegation driven by shifting assemblages of actors, dynamic strategic coupling, and multi-scalar processes of territorialisation. To operationalise our framework, we draw on process tracing and incorporated comparisons across cases.
Schaefer et al. (Wed,) studied this question.