The One Belt One Road and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: Beijing’s New Strategy of Geoeconomics and Geopolitics

While generally seen as China’s foreign economic initiatives designed to promote regional and global economic cooperation, the One Belt One Road (OBOR) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) have been launched by Beijing as a grand economic and diplomatic strategy, which is designed and pursued not only to overcome the nation’s domestic economic problems but also to help promote Chinese influence in the region and beyond, weaken the US dominance in the regional and global economy, and minimize the effects of Washington’s policy of containing China. The OBOR and AIIB initiatives will inevitably bring significant impact on the economic architecture in multiple important areas, which would in turn have strategic implications in the region and beyond.