China’s Belt and Road Initiative: An Intuitive Insights Extraction from Text Document Clustering

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) marks an unprecedented effort in building transport and energy infrastructure across Asia and Europe. Considering the scale of the initiative, there exist a large number of researches focusing on different aspects and topics. This paper intends to collate the textual data from academic studies and official reports to highlight important themes and issues that stand out from the geopolitical, environmental and trade aspects. Findings suggest that in the geopolitical context, China is still facing opposition from certain countries while its presence in the Arctic is one of its central foci. Within the environment corpus, most studies are focused on the historical trends of carbon emissions, consumption or inequality rather than predicting the impact of BRI on the environment. There are concerns by countries involved in the BRI regarding the impact of the development of new ports on possible disruption to their trade activities and competitiveness.

Keywords

• belt and road initiative
• geopolitics
• environment
• trade
• text mining