The contribution addresses the question how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been representented in the field of political economy. This discipline has highlighted two challenges for the BRI, respectively labelled as middle-income trap and Thucydides trap. The article will then show how these two challenges emerged in the Western discourse and were related to the Chinese economic growth, but also how and how quickly they were taken up by the Chinese leadership, which presented the BRI as an answer to both traps.

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