Editors' Words: Introduction to the Special Issue

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is increasingly regarded as Beijing’s most ambitious foreign policy proposition since Deng Xiaoping set China on a path of reform, opening up and maintaining a low profile in international affairs in the early 1980s. While it is still in the process of being fully articulated, the BRI may be viewed as an overarching political vision conferring strategic quality to a set of policy streams that aim to advance transregional multilayered connectivity across Eurasia and Africa, and thereby establish a dynamic of development cross-acceleration between these regions and China.