Theorizing Belt and Road construction mode from institutional and cultural perspectives

There is a gap between the great vision and high-quality targets of the Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)and Western recognition of them,which challenges Chinese and West-ern scholars.This gap should be narrowed by conducting in-depth case studies and com-parative studies at the project level.In recent years,the international academic community has paid increasing attention to Chinese outward foreign direct investment(FDI),but Belt and Road construction is much broader in scope,comprising not only FDI projects but also China-financed projects and emerging mixed projects.Our investigation,observation,and examination of the BRI projects find that compared to their Western counterparts,Chinese enterprises have less experience in doing business in other countries and often pay less at-tention to institutional and cultural differences between China and the host countries.Thus,revisiting the institutional and cultural turn in economic geography and employing its ideas to analyze the BRI projects and summarize their construction modes may contribute to the de-velopment of both economic geography and the BRI.This paper first briefly reviews the background and research trends of the institutional and cultural turn and then summarizes three major modes of Belt and Road construction,namely,EPC(Engineering Procurement Construction)-based projects,concession-based projects,and FDI;finally,it draws on the institutional and cultural turn to classify the BRI projects according to the two indicators of"Breadth and Depth of Territorial Embeddedness"and"Destructive Effect of a Project and/or Technology"into four types:transformative,supportive,ordinary projects and overseas in-dustrial cooperation parks.Different institutional and cultural sensitivity can be observed for each type of project.The preliminary theorization proposed in this paper may offer a potential framework for further research on the BRI.