Globalisation of and from China. A State-Market-Society Perspective of the Belt & Road Initiative

Globalisation has changed China, and now China seeks to reshape globalisation. While American-driven globalisation triggered massive shifts in certain economic functions, it has not altered China’s core structural foundations. Conversely, Chinese attempts to redefine global integration rest on tools shaped by «economics with Chinese characteristics» and their deep embeddedness within Chinese society. China’s «globalisation model» essentially projects its domestic governance and economic principles onto the international stage. The Belt and Road Initiative (bri) is a primary example of this: incorporated into the ccp Constitution in 2017, the bri increasingly structures both domestic economic organisation and international projection. It serves as a key lens for analysing «globalisation from China», revealing how state-led coordination, market deployment, and social embeddedness collectively drive Chinese-led integration. Using the state-market-society paradigm, this study emphasises the duality of this process. On one hand, China’s expansion is a highly integrative, state-led action that links economy, polity, culture, and diplomacy. On the other hand, it reflects a societally embedded process – a «strategy as practice» – rather than a purely premeditated, top-down design. Consequently, China’s role in the global economy may not lead to a «clash of capitalisms» (divergence), but rather to a confrontation between historically embedded structures: the functionally differentiated systems of Western capitalism versus China’s integrated state-market-society framework. In this light, Sino-Western frictions are best understood as tensions between different models of socially embedded regulation.