By
Raphaël P.P. Dosson
Africa-Press – Mozambique. For broader context on China’s strategic vulnerabilities, see the first part of this analysis: “The Malacca Dilemma: China’s Achilles’ Heel”.
The extent of Chinese ramification across the globe, channeled through the geotechnical and geoeconomic mega-project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has sparked what many perceive as a Machiavellian global geostrategic heist—particularly in less developed and less influential regions such as Africa and Latin America.
What some analysts have described as a “String of Pearls”—an apparent strategic network of foreign platforms and infrastructure with potential military utility for force deployment and territorial control—reflects a broader Chinese revisionist and expansionist strategy aimed at securing command of the sea, global trade, and systemic processes. This hypothesis is evidently supported by China’s exponential military advancements, the active modernization of its blue-water navy and strategic lift capabilities, its passive yet persistent expansion into resource-rich and strategically vital chokepoints across the globe, and its growing efforts to assert control over neighboring waters—whether in the South China Sea with the Nine-Dash Line, the Spratly Islands, the Senkaku Islands, or, most critically, Taiwan: the linchpin of China’s maritime ambitions and regional sphere of influence.
This approach to China’s geopolitical grand strategy seen under the BRI, fails to account for the ambivalence created by the ratcheting pressure China faces in securitizing its domestic stability, international agency, national integrity, development, and energy supply. It also overlooks the emerging patterns and processes of multipolarity in the international system:
Internal Dynamics
Domestic stability and order are China’s supreme objectives. Rising domestic demand for resources and capital intensifies the pressure to sustain rapid economic growth, which underpins both social stability and the regime’s performance-based legitimacy. This legitimacy depends on delivering public goods/welfare and demonstrating power on the global stage. Prosperity and domestic order are increasingly tied to geopolitical stability and energy security—particularly the accessibility, availability, and affordability of energy supplies. This becomes even more critical as the regime’s credibility is tested by growing social dissent from a rising middle class, and the pressures of democratization, modernization, and societal liberalization. Contrary to Lateral Pressure Theory—which links economic and demographic growth to resource competition and external conflict—China avoids direct confrontation. Military escalation and external balancing are deemed too costly to domestic stability. Instead, China opts for absolute flexibility (Quanbian), including costly, even counterintuitive maneuvers that defuse confrontation and safeguard internal order.
External Dynamics
China’s heavy reliance on foreign imports of resources and raw materials introduces serious geostrategic vulnerabilities. Maritime chokepoints—such as the Malacca Strait and the Taiwan Strait—pose existential threats, as blockades or embargoes could paralyze the Chinese economy. This recalls past shocks, such as the 1941 U.S. embargo on Japan, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq—instances where geopolitical instability abroad had severe domestic consequences for resource-dependent states.
China’s geopolitical strategy is shaped by structural vulnerabilities and the strategic features of the international system. Strategic planning must now account for the risks posed by piracy, maritime insecurity, and the militarization of supply chains and sea routes.
System-Level Dynamics
As China expands into blue-water naval capacity and drives a reconfiguration of global power, its geopolitical strategies actively reshape the international system. This shift provokes new rivalries, realigns alliances, creates strategic flashpoints, and triggers cycles of militarization, strategic ambiguity, and security dilemmas. This dynamic interaction between state agency and systemic structure defines today’s power climate. The ongoing power transition between the U.S. and China magnifies the strategic significance of key system features—i.e., the strategization of the international system. In this context, power is increasingly viewed through a friction-based lens, turning influence and resources into excludable and rivalrous assets of threat.
A purely unit-level analysis of state behavior limits our understanding of China’s leadership decisions. Traditional perspectives—narrowly focused on material capabilities and zero-sum assumptions—confine China within the Thucydides Trap framework, portraying it as an inevitable aggressor. However, when viewed through the tri-level ratcheting pressures of China’s development and security endowments—defined by (1) domestic stability and domestic-international agency, (2) external geographic constraint, and (3) strategic adaptation to the global distribution of power—its behavior appears more defensive and non-confrontational. This framework forms the core of China’s grand strategy and reflects a broader multipolar model for interpreting state behavior in contemporary international relations.
China’s geopolitical strategies, particularly regarding energy security, must stand on “feet of clay”: hypersensitive to a complex and evolving global environment. It must minimize overt strategization and confrontation, adhere to its doctrine of peaceful rise, yet still support the growth of national power, security responsibilities, and great-power ambitions—goals that sometimes stand in contradiction to the pursuit of peace and stability. While great powers often act based on what they can do, for China, strategy is more often about managing what it cannot do. In a conflict-prone and transitioning international system, China’s geopolitical posture must reflect the paradox of being both a potential source of war and security.
Within this paradox, China’s military expansion and its seemingly revisionist behavior—often framed by offensive realism—can instead be understood as a geo-strategic contingency driven by its development needs, necessary to deter against external balancing in the region, safeguard its still-limited hegemonic role in the global economy, and protect its vulnerable energy networks.
Given the paramount importance of energy and resources for domestic stability (i.e., internal dynamic), defensive realism offers a more accurate lens through which to understand China’s strategy. It views access to critical resources as the one key variable influencing a state’s war-proneness and sense of insecurity—an outlook consistent with China’s strategic ambitions since 2003. Defensive realists too emphasize the importance of preventing any single power from dominating strategic resources. This concern is especially relevant for China, whose energy lifelines remain vulnerable, whether through the Malacca Strait dilemma, First Island Chain encirclement, or control over key maritime chokepoints such as Taiwan.
BRI as the solution
The BRI is China’s geopolitical response to this strategic dilemma. Within this context, the BRI should not be seen as an offensive platform for military or economic expansion, but rather as a vast and diversified network designed to mutually secure resource flows and reduce strategic vulnerabilities. Under a defensive realist framework, the BRI is fundamentally defensive—centered primarily on energy security rather than on acquiring strategic assets that can be readily converted into military power. Since its launch in 2013, over 40% of BRI investments have gone into energy-related trade and projects, with more than 20% into transportation, together accounting for nearly three-quarters of the initiative’s focus on energy security. According to the IEA, BRI-related investments in oil and gas across Asia could reach $10 trillion USD over the next two decades.
With the BRI, China overcomes its perceived offensive impulse by building the largest and most expensive logistical and technological megaproject in human history. Driven by immense internal pressures, the initiative aims to bypass vulnerabilities linked to geostrategic competition and systemic confrontation, especially those associated with maritime and naval domains, which are often strategized during periods of hegemonic power transition. Instead of reinforcing conflict-prone strategies, the BRI seeks to transcend them by fostering more stable forms of geo-economic and geo-technical cooperation.
China’s massive “hard” and “soft” investments in the BRI are clear indicators of its intent to bypass the Malacca Strait, mitigate the “Damocles risk” of blockade or military confrontation, and find viable alternatives to secure internal stability. Even if these alternatives are more costly than maritime routes through Malacca, they are preferred for reducing the existential risks associated with war:
China plans to achieve 8-9 million barrel per day (mb/d) through the “Belt” overland corridor, when put into comparison to the 14-15 mb/d consumed and the 10-11 mb/d imported (7-8 mb/d imported by sea through the dangerous Malacca strait), this represents a massive strategical effort for redistribution. These projects focus essentially on Central Asia:
– Central Asia: Kazakhstan and its neighbors hold one of the largest reserves of oil. China currently imports 1.4 mb/d from Kazakhstan and plans to boost this by 0.6 mb/d through Line D, linking Turkmen and Uzbek fields.
– Russia: China’s top energy partner. Since 2018, Rosneft has supplied 1.6 mb/d. The Power of Siberia pipeline has delivered 1.3 mb/d to Manchuria since 2019. Future expansions—including Power of Siberia 2—will connect Russia’s EU-linked Aural network to China. When complete, the Western and Eastern Route pipelines will add 0.3 and 0.6 mb/d, respectively. Arctic reserves could eventually supply 90 mb of oil, 1,670 tcf of natural gas, and 44 billion barrels of LNG—key for China’s long-term energy security.
– South Asia: The Gwadar–Xinjiang pipeline via Pakistan offers a critical alternative route, bypassing chokepoints like the Malacca Strait. Though it would supply just 0.5 mb/d, its location near the Gulf of Oman and over the Himalayas grants China a strategic foothold in the Indian Ocean. Combined with the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, this strengthens China’s control over its maritime access and counters U.S. denial power.
– Southeast Asia: The Sino–Myanmar pipeline adds another 0.5 mb/d directly into China before the Malacca chokepoint. Together, these diversified routes significantly enhance China’s energy security by reducing reliance on vulnerable sea lanes.
From a Realist perspective, it may seem delusional that a rising power like China could build a global cooperative network involving over 140 states—with more than half of the population, spanning different religions, cultures, and political systems—without provoking overt geostrategic friction, major counterbalancing, or relative gains crises. From a neo-Liberal institutionalist perspective, the BRI is a geopolitical prowess that decisively undermines any Realist argument against diffuse reciprocity and the shadows of the future. From a Geopolitical perspective rooted in multipolarity—and not dyadic power rivalry—this global cooperative symbiosis has been identified as a transforming factor.
The BRI, as a catalyst for this transformation, embodies a new form of multipolar geopolitics. It reflects countries’ ability to transcend the geostrategic constraints of the international system and align their interests non-competitively to ensure long-term cooperation, particularly in the realm of energy security.
In this evolving order, geopolitics has emerged as the new and unavoidable currency of interstate relations. Today—and even more so in the bleak future marked by planetary destruction—energy security has and most certainly will become the highest priority to national security agendas and a shared concern among resource-rich countries in the Global South, including China, Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. More importantly, a geopolitical approach to international relations—beyond ideology—has become essential, as we find ourselves increasingly in a self-help system confronting the limits of social structures and planetary boundaries.
The BRI functions as China’s strategic pathway for co-developing geo-economic and geo-technical assets—aimed at securing energy supply networks and adapting to the structural constraints of the international system—through cooperation and integration rather than confrontation. It connects diverse geo-economic zones via integrated energy corridors that combines both “hard” infrastructure (e.g., pipelines, railways, ports, highways, power plants, factories, oil and hydrocarbon refineries) and “soft” mechanisms (e.g., the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Silk Road Fund, capacity building, expertise and training, and tertiary sector development).
Crucially, dominating or militarizing of BRI assets would undermine China’s long-term cooperative ambitions. Beijing is not simply pursuing short-term strategic leverage; it is invested in energy trade for the long haul. Its geostrategic posture reflects a dual logic: military deterrence and geopolitical cooperation.
As the world continues to shrink and political disputes intensify, it remains to be seen whether states can transcend these precarious conditions through sustained cooperation—or whether they will once again resort to force in the pursuit of security.
moderndiplomacy
For More News And Analysis About Mozambique Follow Africa-Press
