Why
do recipient states manage Chinese capital under the Belt and Road Initiative
in systematically different ways? Existing scholarship emphasizes economic
dependence, Chinese leverage and, increasingly, recipient agency and domestic
politics. This project conceptualizes BRI capital as an external capital shock
that enters recipient political systems with unusually broad domestic
management latitude. This latitude gives ruling coalitions room to adapt
implementation to domestic political constraints, producing distinct logics of
control over BRI projects. Drawing on approximately 160 elite interviews and
comparative analysis of Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Papua New Guinea, the
dissertation traces this variation across sharply different political settings.
Recipient states are not simply recipients of Chinese influence, but political
actors whose considerable latitude to govern Chinese capital gives them both
the capacity to adapt and the freedom to fail.