The China Dream, New Regionalism, and the Belt and Road Initiative: Ideological Architecture and Geopolitical Contestation in South Asia

This paper examines how the China Dream (Zhongguo meng) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) function together as an integrated geostrategic undertaking, with a particular focus on what this nexus means for South Asia. The paper's primary analytical framework is asymmetric regionalism, understood as a process of connectivity-building in which a dominant state furnishes infrastructure, financing, and institutional templates while smaller states retain meaningful capacity to engage selectively, renegotiate terms, or recalibrate commitments. Constructivist insights inform the analysis of how ideological narratives legitimate the BRI's external projection, while the framework of asymmetric regionalism provides the structural mechanism through which these ambitions encounter South Asian realities. Through disaggregated examination of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), BRI engagement in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and the structural resistance mounted by India, the analysis demonstrates that the BRI's South Asian trajectory is shaped by political agency, domestic accountability, and competing strategic interests and not simply by Chinese design. The paper advances three original arguments: asymmetric regionalism provides a more analytically precise framework than either debt-trap narratives or strategic partnership accounts; domestic politics in partner states functions as an underweighted structural constraint on BRI outcomes; and India's resistance to the BRI reflects sovereign, territorial, and strategic interests rather than a civilizational competition.