Navigating China’s global port investment: geopolitical debates and geo-economic realities

China has become a major investor in overseas ports, a trend commonly explained through geopolitical strategy or commercial calculation. This article argues instead that Chinese port projects are assembled through place-specific, cross-border growth coalitions linking Chinese state agencies, policy banks, state-owned enterprises, and host-country political and economic actors. It treats state-led globalisation as the broader institutional process through which Chinese state actors mobilise capital and firms abroad, and growth coalitions as the project-level mechanism through which these resources are negotiated and embedded in particular places. The framework is operationalised through investment location choice, project financing and governance arrangements. A qualitative comparison of Piraeus, Hambantota and Djibouti identifies three coalition pathways: an institutionalised coalition, a developmental coalition under fiscal asymmetry and a state-building coalition. The comparison shows that state coordination does not produce uniform outcomes. Outcomes depend on how locational priorities, financial risks and multi-level governance arrangements align with host-country development agendas and political institutions. Growth coalitions therefore explain how state-led globalisation is translated into differentiated territorial outcomes in the port sector.