Research Database

This study proposes evaluating trade activities from both economic and resource perspectives so that sustainable and resilient trade can be achieved. Although these findings provide valuable insights to BRI-involved Chinese provinces and ASEAN countries, these insights can also be shared by other trade partners since similar challenges may exist in their trade activities.

China offers the Global Energy Interconnections (GEI) as a planetary project to deliver sustainable development and climate action through large-scale energy transition by interconnecting most of the world's grids. What does this mean for Southeast Asian countries' regional quest for greater energy connectivity? While the envisaged China-Southeast Asia interconnections promise a durable regional energy connectivity, bringing distant renewable energy to demand centers using GEI technologies, these future energy systems are not free of technical and political challenges. A closer look at this future interconnections further reveals other chokepoints: politically powerful domestic energy regimes; levels of trust between China and Southeast Asian countries; aging and absent transmission infrastructures; heterogeneous national energy markets and regulations; and differing receptions and perceptions towards China's externalization of its surplus industrial capacity.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted the world's attention since it was proposed. This study focuses on the BRI in the energy sector in ASEAN. It examines the current status of China's investment into ASEAN's energy sector. It then discusses the problems of China's investment into the ASEAN energy sector with two cases in Myanmar. In addressing the problems and challenges, the study adopts a ‘sense of ownership’ framework to analyze how to improve the acceptability of the Chinese investment. It argues that the BRI priorities, including ‘people-to-people bond’, provide an opportunity to bring a sense of ownership to the community networking that is to be built as a key part of BRI and more profoundly, an opportunity to establish a good image and to make investment projects successful.