Located in the central Zhejiang province, Yiwu is a mountainous region originally inhabited by farmers. The poverty-stricken land left farmers with no option but commercial trading for a living. The city has a long history of being a hub for commercial trade. In the last two decades, the Yiwu international trade market has grown to be the world's largest small commodities market. This book studies the rapid development of 'Yiwu Business Circle' in the past two decades. Based on field research, the book analyzes the 'Yiwu Business Circle' from different levels such as the market system, supporting industry, merchant group and logistics network. The book also reveales the challenges and opportunities posed to 'Yiwu Business Circle' by the Belt and Road Initiative. It explores how the 'Yiwu Business Circle' will contribute to the Belt and Road Initiative by utilizing its strong business, logistics, capital and information flow platform that is established and shared by global manufacturers and merchants.

Silk Road was once the most important economic-cultural tie connecting the Eurasian countries before the rise of the West. In September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the initiative to jointly build the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road, which is abbreviated as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This book analyzes the BRI through the approach of political economy and establishes the analytic framework of BRI from historical and comparative perspectives. It clearly displays the strategic considerations, future vision, constructing framework, governmental actions, latest achievements, multiple opportunities and potential risks of BRI.As China's grand national development strategy and international cooperation initiative, the BRI will largely shape China's domestic and foreign policies in the Xi Jinping era. The book is the first academic monograph on the BRI and it enables readers to comprehensively understand this initiative and its implications to China, Eurasia and the world.

China’s New Silk Road initiative constitutes one of the most ambitious projects in recent decades designed to change the pattern of the global economic division of labour as well as the geostrategic balance of power. It has the potential to create a new fabric of industrial value creation that links China and East Asia via Central and South Asia with Europe, and to forge new regional and multilateral institutions that complement or compete with existing regional and global governance systems. First proposed in 2013, the new initiative is only now starting to be rolled-out, with trade relations gradually intensifying, and the first investment projects and infrastructure clusters becoming manifest. However, the full impact of the evolving new regional value chains on global goods flows, investment activity, supra-national institution building, as well as their wider international implications, remains undetermined. This book brings together leading scholars from economics, political science and area studies, who present the latest cutting-edge knowledge and the latest state-of-the-art economic and political analysis on how the new initiative is developing and likely to develop.

The book studies multilateral population security issues and relevant governance strategies caused by international migration in the countries impacted by China’s Belt and Road initiative and their border areas. Buttressed by solid data mining and policy analysis, the title looks into the demographic trends of international migration in China and some Asian Belt and Road countries and stresses the urgency for more effective governance practices. Seeking to address the population security crisis triggered by the Initiative, the authors propose the idea of “multilateral population security governance”, grounded in the real-world challenges facing Belt and Road countries while also drawing on experiences of migration governance in western countries. As a new governance model, it calls for cross-border joint action and takes into consideration pertinent factors including economy, politics, culture, religion and commerce. Several case studies and comparative studies are offered in the chapters to illuminate the significance and effect of this cooperative mechanism. The book will be of interest to researchers and government officials interested in non-traditional security, international migration and formal demography as well as topics on population, resources and environment.

Since the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, Wenzhou City of China's Zhejiang Province has witnessed large-scale institutional change and rapid economic development. This book studies the institutional change and economic development in Wenzhou since China's reform and opening-up. It concludes that the most important characteristic of Wenzhou model is that the city is the first to promote industrialization and urbanization by privatization and marketization in Zhejiang. As privatization and marketization reflect reform, and industrialization and urbanization represent development, Wenzhou model promotes development through economic reform. In the early years of the reform and opening-up, the people of Wenzhou boldly faced the constraints of traditional planned economy, bravely explored the market-oriented reform and opened up a new path to regional economic development. This book also contains the stories of the people of Wenzhou.

Officially announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has since become the centrepiece of China’s economic diplomacy. It is a commitment to ease bottlenecks to Eurasian trade by improving and building networks of connectivity across Central and Western Asia, where the BRI aims to act as a bond for the projects of regional cooperation and integration already in progress in Southern Asia. But it also reaches out to the Middle East as well as East and North Africa, a truly strategic area where the Belt joins the Road. Europe, the end-point of the New Silk Roads, both by land and by sea, is the ultimate geographic destination and political partner in the BRI. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the BRI, its logic, rationale and implications for international economic and political relations.

The participation of citizens in democratic politics serves as an indicator to measure a country's development, its political modernization and political civilization.To promote citizens' political participation, it is important to have them participate extensively in local governance and exercise their constitutional rights. This book analyses Zhejiang's experience in democratic consultation, hearing, people's proposal solicitation system, television and Internet political consultation, official and citizen dialogue on government websites. It studies how common people can actively participate in politics and manage the public affairs of the country through institutionalized ways and means.