The Dynamics of Cross-cultural Trust and Migration in International Trade: An Exploration on China’s “One Belt One Road” Strategy

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the strategic concept of building a “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, currently referred to as the “One Belt and One Road” (OBOR, hereafter) initiatives. OBOR, likely to remain one of most fundamental and strategic blueprints of China’s leaderships  until 2022 or beyond, is not merely an international trade strategy, but also aims to help China to deepen its economic structure, to deal with the serious overcapacities in low-value-added export sectors, and to reshape China’s status in the global economic and political orders. The OBOR strategy will include more than 60 countries in Eurasian and African continents.

This project intends to discover the relationship between cross-cultural trust and migration in international trade in the OBOR region, taking China and a broad selection of Eurasian countries as examples. The research questions will be twofold: (1) The dynamics of cross-cultural trust between China and its trade partners arising from OBOR. (2) Transformed risk experienced by migrant traders and institutions as the consequence of OBOR. In terms of methodology, this project shall apply a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, where appropriate supported by experimental studies. Network analysis will be employed to address the issues of trust and immigration in an extending interaction scenario of the OBOR.