After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a political regime was accompanied by a new dominance of liberal democracy as a descriptive language. Concepts of political science, sociology, and economics that had been developed for the analysis of Western-type polities were applied to the various phenomena in the newly liberated countries. But the language of liberal democracies blurs the understanding of the current state of post-communism as it leads to conceptual stretching and brings in a host of hidden presumptions.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (hereinafter BRI) – Yi dai yi lu – is Xi Jinping’s flagship foreign policy which brings together the country’s geopolitical and geo-economic aims under the banner of the ‘community of shared destiny of mankind’.  Xi’s ambitions to make China a ‘strong and wealthy nation’ under the ‘Two Centennial Goals’, has made the BRI a priority even with the pressures of Covid-19.