Geo-Economic Linkages between China and the Countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road and Their Types

Wei Hu; Yuejing Ge; Zhiding Hu; Shuai Ye; Feng Yang; Haining Jiang; Kun Hou; Yun Deng

doi:10.3390/ijerph191912946

Geo-Economic Linkages between China and the Countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road and Their Types

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Oct 10;19(19):12946. doi: 10.3390/ijerph191912946.

Authors

Wei Hu¹, Yuejing Ge², Zhiding Hu³, Shuai Ye⁴, Feng Yang⁵, Haining Jiang¹, Kun Hou⁶, Yun Deng¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China.
² Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
³ Institute for Global Innovation and Development, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.
⁴ School of Geographical Science, Qinghai Normal University, Xining 810008, China.
⁵ School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
⁶ School of Remote Sensing and Geomatics Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China.

Abstract

With the advances of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the geo-economic interactions between China and countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road counties (MSRCs) continue to increase, and analyzing the geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs is extremely important for a scientific understanding of bilateral geo-economic cooperation. Differently from the traditional logic of geo-economic competition and cooperation, we constructed a new framework based on the dominant factors of geo-economic relations and used an extreme random forest regression model to classify the geo-economic relation types between China and MSRCs from 2006 to 2017. The results show that the unbalanced development of investment and trade between China and MSRCs hindered the enhancement of the intensity of bilateral geo-economic linkage from 2006 to 2017. The "Matthew effect" of China's geo-economic flow linkage with MSRCs is significant. There are obvious differences in the dominant factors affecting the types of geo-economic relations between China and MSRCs, and the distribution of the importance of the indices of the types of geo-economic relations in each country is disordered. Geopolitics, markets, and resources have played important roles in the geo-economic linkages between China and MSRCs. There are five types of geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs: market-oriented type, resource-oriented type, market-resource-oriented type, market-geopolitics-oriented type, and resource-geopolitics-oriented type, of which the market-oriented type is the most important type of geo-economic relations. In the future, China should focus on regional powers along the Maritime Silk Road for bilateral geo-economic cooperation, actively promote the balanced development of bilateral geo-economic elements flows, strengthen geopolitical cooperation with MSRCs, and formulate cooperation plans according to the types of geo-economic relations.

Keywords: China; extreme random forest regression model; geo-economic linkage; geo-economic types; the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (MSRCs).

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

China
Economic Development*
Silk*

Substances

Silk

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Substances

Grants and funding