Chinese Overseas Ports in Europe and the Americas Understanding Smooth and Turbulent Waters

This book analyzes the progress, gains, and effects of Chinese overseas ports through in-depth and systematic studies of numerous cases in Europe and Latin America.

China’s participation in overseas ports, especially under the rubric of the Belt and Road Initiative, is a matter of great concern to businesspeople, policymakers, and researchers pondering the implications of Chinese infrastructure activities and overseas investment. Yet there is insufficient knowledge concerning the actual nature of China’s role in specific ports, the economic and other consequences associated with that involvement, and the wider economic, political, and environmental effects of those economic effects. The chapters of this book fill these gaps by examining ports in diverse European countries like Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom and various Latin American countries, including Brazil and Jamaica. The book illustrates why Chinese seaports succeed or fail, why they have the military, economic, and other consequences that they do, and why these consequences produce or fail to generate other effects such as political influence.

This book will appeal to audiences with interests in China’s overseas seaports, foreign direct investment (FDI), and infrastructure specifically and foreign direct investment, geopolitics, and the political economy of national security more generally.