De-risking, re-balancing and recentralising: Intra-state relations in Chinese-backed transport infrastructure projects in Europe

1. Introduction: infrastructure and power

The Chinese government's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is part of China's wider internationalisation effort and is also the most visible aspect of an ‘infrastructure turn’ that seeks to connect China globally (Strange, 2023). Given the BRI's coalescing of geopolitical power, geoeconomic ambition, and infrastructural connectivity it has produced various spatialised analyses by geographers, planners, political scientists, political economists, anthropologists, and development studies scholars (for example, Narins & Agnew, 2020; Flint & Zhu, 2019; Lin et al., 2021; Cheng & Apostolopoulou, 2023). These spatialised analyses of the BRI and Chinese-backed infrastructure have been useful in both focusing on how geopolitical shifts are realised through major infrastructure projects and on how such projects play out developmentally and politically. These analyses reveal the resilience of long-standing spatialisations such as binary geopolitical schisms but also introduce new spatial framings for capturing these developments. We review these in more detail in the next section, but they tend to either focus excessively on national states as actors in bilateral relations or geopolitical opposition, or where they move beyond the (inter-)national scale they propose a range of zonal and/or networked ontologies. By contrast we retain a focus on the state (Allen & Cochrane, 2010) and examine how central-local state relations shape and are shaped by China's engagement in infrastructure. As such we speak to these existing debates on the BRI and follow wider research that addresses infrastructure as a way of looking at the spatiality of state power (Larkin, 2013).

Focusing on the local scale and local state is important given that infrastructure connectivity projects are anchored in nodes – such as ports, stations, and airports - in particular localities (Harvey, 1982; Wiig & Silver, 2019). Additionally, relationships between Chinese and European actors increasingly centre on subnational diplomacy (Boni, 2023) and it is in proximity to projects that groups bear the costs of infrastructure investments (Apostolopoulou, 2021). Analytically, as Lin and Ai (2020, p. 1124) note, “contingency” pervades the realisation of the BRI through “highly practical … infrastructural processes”. Zajontz (2022) also shows how cross-border corridors can be hampered by the political will of a given state which compromises the realisation of seamless logistical networks. Because infrastructure projects rarely proceed smoothly, we foreground this contingency and pose the question of how and why have recent Chinese-backed infrastructure projects failed or stalled and what this reveals around geopolitics and state power.

To address such central-local state relations and the contingency of competing spatial strategies we adopt Jessop et al.’s (2008) TPSN framework, which is ‘polymorphic’, involving socio-spatial framings around territory, place, scale and network. While others have analysed the BRI ‘on the ground’ (e.g. Oliveira et al., 2020) – particularly through single case studies – these are generally not systematised. The ‘thick description’ of such studies is helpful but makes it hard to discern patterns of spatial strategies – such as glocalisation and recentralisation – that we focus on. TPSN helps us systematise the analysis of these spatial strategies and provides a more robust framework for comparison across cases. We use TPSN to comparatively analyse three cases of Chinese transport infrastructure investment in Europe: Duisburg container terminal in Germany, the Port of Trieste in Italy, and the Hungarian section of the Budapest-Belgrade Railway. We show that all shared a ‘glocal’ spatial imaginary of places being more virtuously connected to global economic networks, but the political realities played out in different ways due, in large part, to how central and local states diverged in their visions. In Duisburg and Trieste, growing EU-wide moves towards ‘de-risking’ meant the projects did not go ahead while the Budapest-Belgrade Railway Upgrade (BBRU)'s progress has been sluggish. We argue that despite very different political-economic contexts and structural relations with China, the net effect was a re-centralisation of state power at the expense of the local state, though in Trieste's case such tensions opened space for alternative investors.

The data is drawn largely from the European Research Council funded Re-orienting development: the dynamics and effects of Chinese infrastructure investment in Europe (REDEFINE) project, which is studying the dynamics of Chinese investment in European infrastructure. The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section we expand on the extant spatial framings of the BRI and analyse their limitations as a way of introducing the idea of “polymorphy”, which is elaborated in the following section. The next section outlines our methods before analysing three European infrastructure projects, each of which displays different dynamics in how central-local state relations played out. We conclude by arguing that the de-risking agenda being promoted across some European countries is seeing the re-centralisation of state power.

2. Between hopes and fears: existing spatial analyses of the BRI

In this section we outline how existing analyses of the BRI and Chinese infrastructure investments are framed through various spatial ontologies. These are (a) binary geopolitical framings, (b) a range of relational framings, and (c) a variety of ‘new’ ontologies to capture connectivity. These can and have been used in combination to great effect, and we concur with a loose body of recent work that has called for more grounded, polyvocal and multi-scalar narratives of China's internationalisation (e.g. Schindler & DiCarlo, 2022), but these have largely been applied to cases in the global South where different power dynamics compared to Europe exist between states and Chinese actors. We also argue that these mainly qualitative studies have not systematised the various socio-spatial dynamics at play. Addressing this, the following section sets out how we use Jessop et al.’s (2008) TPSN framework to analyse the emergent process of assembling infrastructure projects.

The first, and dominant, way of framing the BRI and China's wider infrastructure push has been geopolitical and binary. Notably the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China has engulfed Europe as a strategic arena. Commentators speak of a ‘new Cold War’ with infrastructure financing and construction as a focus (Godehardt & Postel-Vinay, 2020; Schindler et al., 2022). Here, Sum (2019) analyses BRI ‘imaginaries’ as bifurcated between ‘hopes’ and ‘fears’. On the Chinese side, state-sanctioned representations of the BRI draw on Confucian-inspired cooperation and presents it as a global social good (Alves & Lee, 2022; Chen, 2023; Silvius, 2021). Conversely, in much of Europe and the US we see a ‘China threat’ narrative (Rogelja & Tsimonis, 2020) in which Chinese capitalism is ‘weaponised’ (Lai et al., 2020). Shortly after China began to increase its investments in Europe commentaries hinted at potential tensions (Meunier et al., 2014) but more recently the threat narratives have been heightened (ETNC, 2023). Babić and Dixon (2022) argue that the lightning rod for this turn against China was critical infrastructures such as nuclear energy and 5G networks (Friis & Lysne, 2021). Some of this shift came from pressure by the US, but the EU also began to position China as a “systemic rival” (Brennan & Vecchi, 2021). These analyses see infrastructure investment largely as an extension of Chinese state power1 and thereby poses a security threat. This growing infrastructure rivalry has spawned new US and EU programmes designed to counter the BRI,2 as well as moves towards ‘de-risking’ (The Economist, 2023). Such geopolitical framings help to explain the world, often by reducing it to Manichean choices and, once established, they can be “sticky” (Jerden, 2014) which may result in alternative narratives being suppressed.

Secondly, some analyses move beyond oppositional framings to argue relationally (Lee, 2022; Mohan & Lampert, 2013) such that the dynamics of China's internationalisation are conditioned by the political and economic dynamics that Chinese actors encounter in countries where they invest and operate (Lampton et al., 2020; Mayer & Zhang, 2021; Raco et al., 2023). Other analyses are pitched at the state-to-state relationships between China and an investment-receiving country (e.g. Grgic, 2019; Odoom, 2017; Brill & Reboredo, 2019) while others focus on different countries' changing approval for China (Summers et al., 2022; Turcsanyi & Kachlikova, 2020); generally showing how attitudes to China have become more negative. This relational perspective has much value but tends to entrench state-centrism through its incessant focus on bilateralism (Klinger & Muldavin, 2019; Oakes, 2021) in turn cementing particular (realist) world views. The corollary of this methodological nationalism is to obscure other actors beyond state elites.

A more normative take on relationality, which is central to our focus on infrastructure, is a ‘glocal’ framing. Glocalisation (Swyngedouw, 2004) captured the idea that nation-states were being ‘hollowed out’ by globalisation and that entrepreneurial cities need to compete for scarce global capital. Within the global ‘infrastructure turn’ (Dodson, 2017) and a putative New Cold War, this idea has been reworked. Notably Schindler and Kanai (2021) have discussed ‘getting the territory right’ involving “an emergent regime of infrastructure-led development whose ultimate objective is to produce functional transnational territories that can be ‘plugged in’ to global networks of production and trade” (p.40). The so-called ‘infrastructure state’ (Schindler & DiCarlo, 2022) facilitates this ‘plugging in’ through its spatial planning to establish (hopefully) virtuous relations between places.

The third set of framings are more diffuse and closely linked to the relational framings. However, their ontologies are more zonal and networked than primarily state-based, though they acknowledge the inter-penetration of socio-spatial categories. One body of work focuses on cities and city-regions and the ways in which transport infrastructures channel people, goods and capital (Wiig et al., 2023), but also on how the BRI can accelerate urbanisation in places once considered ‘hinterlands’ (Zheng et al., 2023). Such studies also warn of how such infrastructures can ‘splinter’ cities and increase inequalities (Wiig & Silver, 2019). A parallel set of studies seek to understand the territorialisations that certain infrastructures create and the linkages between these and other territories and flows. Sassen (2018) discusses forms of territorialisation that sit within and/or cross-cut state territories while concepts like the ‘zone’ (Easterling, 2016) and ‘enclave’ (Mohan, 2013) seek to capture some of the ways in which things like ports or SEZs are premised on exceptional forms of governance that foster dispossession and extraversion.

Perhaps the most prescient of these ‘new’ socio-spatial ontologies is the ‘corridor’. While corridors are not an exclusively Chinese innovation (Nugent & Lamarque, 2022) the BRI is arguably a mega corridor made up of several regional corridors (Chen, 2023). Mayer and Zhang (2021) see corridor narratives as a way of engendering a ‘seamless’ geography of neoliberal globalisation (Sidaway & Woon, 2017). The transnational nature of actual corridors means that the politics of assembling road corridors (Zajontz, 2022) or cross-border railways (Lampton et al., 2020) requires multiple negotiations and rarely results in a frictionless space. Likewise, Murton and Narins (2024) focus on chokepoints that constrict flows and undermine the mobility that is inherent in capitalist accumulation (Cowen, 2014). Murton and Lord's (2020) analysis of Chinese infrastructure corridors in Nepal foregrounds this need for multi-scalar and multi-actor perspectives (Klinger, 2020; Cheng & Apostolopoulou, 2023), many of which have been brought together in several special issues (Alff & Spies, 2023; Sidaway et al., 2020; Yeh, 2016). These studies have shown that in ‘weaker’ states in the global South ruling elites (Klinger & Muldavin, 2019) use Chinese-backed infrastructure as a means of cementing central state authority over their territories, much as Mann (1984) has argued. From these studies we have derived our focus on intra-state dynamics but systematised them using the TPSN framework and applied these insights to cases in Europe rather than the global South, which raises different questions around the centralisation of state power. The question then is how we conceptualise the complex processes of infrastructural connectivity that simultaneously link places, but at the same time are embedded in national and local state spaces.

3. Systematising socio-spatial relations

To make sense of multiple and overlapping socio-spatial processes we adopt Jessop et al.’s (2008) TPSN framework (see also Brenner, 2019; Jessop, 2019). These authors argue that when deploying socio-spatial concepts one tends to dominate explanation leading to various ‘centrisms’, which reify a particular dimension; in China's internationalisation this is the methodological nationalism discussed above. Instead, they argue, we must specify our socio-spatial categories and then see how they combine in concrete analysis of “polymorphy” – “the organization of sociospatial relations in multiple forms” (p.389).

The building blocks of their framework encompass large debates, so we only sketch the broad contours here. Territory refers to bounding in order to exercise political control and creates insides and outsides (Branch, 2017). Place relates to spatial embeddedness wherein proximity may structure social relations and produce areal differentiation (Massey, 1994). Scale captures the socially and politically constructed spatial registers which can be arranged hierarchically but may be interpenetrating and are only ever temporarily stabilised (Brenner, 2019). Crucially, representation of scale is important (Swyngedouw, 2004) so while it is a social concept, its conceptualisation has effects. Networks seek to capture the transversal interconnections across space (Cox, 2013) and are seen as central to more deterritorialised forms of globalisation (Amin, 2004). Table 1 is reproduced from their original article (2008, p. 395) and summarises these four categories.

Table 1. Beyond one-dimensionalism: Conceptual orientations (Reproduced from Jessop et al., 2008, p. 395).

Jessop et al. (2008) posit that we need to explore the “differential weighting and articulation” (p. 393) of spatial dimensions in each spatiotemporal context. The four dimensions of TPSN ‘articulate’ in a heuristic way as shown in Table 1 but such combinations cannot be specified a priori. Rather, through a ‘spiral movement’ analysts start with one dimension and build up a more complex-concrete analysis. While these authors apply their framework to the historical geographies of capitalism, they posit that TPSN can also inform “contentious politics” which “examines different forms of contestation, resistance, mobilization, and struggle ‘from below’” (p. 397); things we invariably encounter around large infrastructure projects.

TPSN is a heuristic which is “attentive to interconnectedness” (Lambach, 2022, p. 289) but has been criticised for a priori delimiting the range of possible spatial ontologies such as bodies or digital spaces (Lambach, 2022). TPSN has also been critiqued for its potential Eurocentrism (Middell, 2019) and whether each of the four constituent elements are congruent in terms of being synthesised (Mayer, 2008). Methodologically we agree that despite starting from a rejection of spatial reification, the combining of the four elements could be ‘endless’ (Mayer, 2008, p. 416) and so recognise that social actors create the spaces that reciprocally shape social action in a recursive way. That is, we start from “concrete social processes and practices” rather than spaces per se (Mayer, 2008, p 416; Swyngedouw, 2004; Hart, 2018). Another useful critique is the lack of temporality in TPSN which integrates multiple socio-spatial registers, but says less about how and why these change over time (Middell, 2019).

Some have already used TPSN in BRI studies. Chen (2023) and Zajontz (2022) examine the imbrication of multiple state spatial strategies along a corridor, showing that attempts to re-scale economic activity regionally are frustrated by the politics of state-based actors. Mayer and Zhang (2021) explicitly use TPSN to look at how the BRI re-territorialises both discursively through maps but also materially through infrastructure corridors, and how states are re-scaled in multiple ways especially supra-nationally. We build on these ideas of polymorphy to analyse three Chinese-backed infrastructure projects in Europe.

4. Methodology and case selection

In order to analyse how and why recent Chinese-backed infrastructure projects have failed or stalled we deploy TPSN to explore central-local relations and the re-centralisation of state power. This is done comparatively because comparison enables us to understand the phenomenon of Chinese backed infrastructure projects in ways that do not reduce them to instantiations of a single ‘Chinese capitalism’ (Zhang & Peck, 2016). Rather we use multiple case studies to focus on both the general and specific but what TPSN adds is a framework – albeit a lose one – for systematising the analysis of socio-spatial strategies across cases. Developing ‘hard’ criteria for comparison is difficult in qualitative case studies but TPSN gives us a heuristic for structuring such analysis. The data presented here is drawn from a project comparing Chinese-backed infrastructure projects across Europe. This paper represents the first phase of data collection wherein we used secondary sources to identify actors, processes and patterns. Future data collection will involve qualitative interviews and participant observation to drill into causality.

Given our focus on central-local relations we chose cases of similar types of transport infrastructure project (brownfield upgrades) but in political contexts where internal state structures and relations with China and the EU were different. Germany has consistently been one of the biggest recipients of Chinese FDI, is central to governance of the EU, and frequently exerts power over other EU members. The Duisburg case involves the development of a container terminal in an existing inland port with rail links to China. Italy was the first and only G7 country to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China on the BRI, which was symbolically important for wider China-Europe relations. The Trieste case focuses on the upgrade of logistics hubs around the port area. Hungary's socialist past and co-option by Western capitalism coupled with its location in Central Europe means it faces in two directions. We discuss how the government exploits this in leveraging investment. The Budapest-Belgrade Railway Upgrade (BBRU) seeks to enhance part of an existing railway connecting Hungary and Serbia, as part of a corridor linking to Piraeus port in Greece.

Being mindful of the need to address practices rather than spatialities we used process-tracing (Bengtsson & Ruonavaara, 2017) to understand each infrastructure project and the actors it enrolled, and analysed the spatial registers that they emphasised. We adopt the idea of assemblage, which captures the socio-material nature of infrastructure (Taufen et al., 2024) and helps identify actors enrolled in such projects (Xiao & Webber, 2020). From here it was possible to follow Jessop et al.’s (2008) ‘spiral movement’ to tease out the other relevant socio-spatial dynamics. Such a process is purposive, otherwise we could end up with ‘endless’ combinations of TPS and N qua TPS and N (Mayer, 2008); there must be a deductive purpose to the inductive movement of adding complexity. Our question around how and why infrastructure projects failed meant we started by understanding the infrastructure ‘visions’ and the actors promoting them. From there we examined the unfolding of the projects over time. While the BRI was formally launched in 2013 it is widely acknowledged that it is a post-hoc rationalisation of existing initiatives (e.g. Chen, 2023) although Chinese investment into European infrastructure increased significantly between 2013 and 2017 and the BBRU was initiated in 2013. In our other two cases the temporal focus is narrower, from 2019 to 2022, but the projects never materialised for reasons we explore. However, these infrastructure projects built on earlier Chinese investments in high-profile firms such as Italy's Pirelli, a tire manufacturer, in 2015, and Germany's Kuka, an industrial robot manufacturer, in 2016.

In order to track the actors, their visions, and the unfolding socio-spatial relations surrounding the infrastructure projects we used secondary sources in English, German, Italian and Hungarian, with those in local languages being translated by the authors. These included news reports from a spectrum of media outlets, specialist engineering and logistics press (e.g. Maritime Executive, Railway Technology), company briefings, policy statements, and speeches from stakeholders within the infrastructure assemblages. We recognise the limitations of such sources, particularly the partisan nature of some media outlets, though we sampled a range of sources to help triangulate between ideological standpoints. The next three sections present our case studies before we turn to an analysis across cases.

5. Duisburg Gateway Terminal project: proactive local state blocked by federal level

Duisburg is a medium-sized city in the Ruhrgebiet, Germany's former industrial heartlands. The city has Germany's largest inland port, which since 2013 has also been the terminus of a railway connecting Europe and China. The port is managed by Duisport AG, which is jointly owned by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the city of Duisburg. In 2019, Duisport AG announced a ca. €100 million project to build a new intermodal terminal, the Duisburg Gateway Terminal. The terminal, to be constructed on a disused peninsula in the port, is designed to link rail, ship, and road traffic. One of the main investors, alongside Duisport AG and two European logistics companies, was to be the state-owned Chinese shipping company COSCO. COSCO was supposed to take a 30% stake in the project, with Duisport contributing 30% and the two European partners 20% each (Harpers, 2019). However, in October 2022 it emerged that COSCO had not been part of the Gateway Terminal project since June of that year (dpa, 2022) and city officials began to downplay links with China.

The case illustrates the efforts of a place – Duisburg, represented by city officials and the management of the port company – to reverse long-term economic decline through linkage into new networks. Building Duisburg into a node in an intercontinental logistics network connecting it to the growing Chinese economy was seen as the key to attaining new opportunities at the global scale. However, these efforts came under pressure from a shift in Germany's national policy stance towards Chinese investment, illustrating the risk to local development initiatives in the face of the recentralisation of state power.

For Duisburg, the prospective investment by COSCO represented not only much-needed capital, but also an endorsement of its attempts at network integration. Duisburg suffered heavily from the decline of the regional steel industry (Friedrichs, 2001), and pinned its hopes for economic regeneration on becoming an international logistics hub. The city relies on its port to provide employment in the context of an unemployment rate that is twice Germany's average (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2023). While the port was central to the city's bid to attract Chinese investment, city officials also sought Chinese investment in other sectors (Lim & Limbach, 2023). To capture their ambition Duisburg's city officials adopted the moniker of Germany's ‘China city’ (Teuber & Grünhage, 2021) and linking it to the BRI (Giustolisi and Terstriep, 2020). The Duisburg port company described the new terminal as “a central gateway hub especially for train traffic from and to China” (Harpers, 2019, p. 49), emphasising the expected expansion of trade with China. Despite limited volumes of traffic on the China-Duisburg railway link, the networking strategy was effective in drawing in German multinational logistics companies, as well as a host of smaller Chinese enterprises (Tagesschau, 2021).

The efforts of city officials and port managers in Duisburg to attract Chinese investments were initially supported by national-level political elites. Between 2010 and 2022, China transacted a total of €32 billion in mergers and acquisitions and greenfield projects in Germany, making Germany the country with the most inbound Chinese investment after the UK (Kratz et al., 2023). The relationship to China was long treated as vital to German prosperity and German political elites largely took an uncritical stance towards China, even in the face of growing US pressure. However, as Chinese actors began buying up leading German companies in increasingly strategic sectors, trade and investment links began attracting criticism. Partly in consequence, Chinese investments into Germany peaked in 2014 and have fallen since (Matthes, 2020). Beginning with a change in national government in 2021, Germany began to see China as a ‘strategic rival’ (Cai & Efstathopoulos, 2023) and the national strategy towards China underwent a decisive shift. Despite a split in the German political elite over how to engage with China, concerns about Chinese attempts to exert political influence abroad, the growing power of the CCP within China, and aggressive attempts by some Chinese State-Owned Enterprises to acquire technology led to increased scrutiny of Chinese investments (Dieter, 2021; Germann, 2022). A further inflection point in national policy towards China came in October 2022 with the controversial decision to allow COSCO to acquire a minority stake in a terminal in the port of Hamburg, albeit only after the national government imposed stringent conditions to limit any influence COSCO may seek to exert (FAZ, 2022).

The limited dependence of the Duisburg port on trade with China (Pascha, 2021) notwithstanding, the hardening of the national mood led politicians in Duisburg to quietly abandon China-related projects. A ‘smart city’ project with Chinese digital communications technology company Huawei, which had been criticised over data security, was allowed to lapse (Kalscheur & Wahl, 2022). Shortly afterwards, it became clear that COSCO was no longer part of the Duisburg Gateway Terminal project. In October 2022 port officials announced that there were “naturally” no Chinese firms invested in the port, while also maintaining that COSCO remained a valued customer (Kalscheur & Wahl, 2022). The North Rhine-Westphalia state news broadcaster confirmed that COSCO's exit had been initiated by Duisport AG and its European partners, and claimed the decision was made for purely commercial reasons (Köksalan, 2022). However, COSCO was at the time locked into contentious negotiations with the German government over its investment in the Port of Hamburg (Maritime Executive, 2023), suggesting the exit from Duisburg may have been undertaken to allow that investment to proceed. Moreover, the national Green party, a member of the ruling coalition seen as a key driver of government scepticism towards China, celebrated COSCO's exit (Wyputta, 2023), indicating the possibility of pressure by national-level political actors. The causes of COSCO's exit have remained secret, are subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Duisport AG and COSCO (Rat der Stadt Duisburg, 2023) and are therefore known only to the companies involved and selected government officials. In light of the available evidence, it however seems improbable that the shift in national policy played no role in the decision.

Duisburg's attempts to build a distinct place-based strategy via deepening links between its port and Chinese-operated trade networks had some initial successes but appear to have yielded to the interests of political actors at the national scale. Where actors in Duisburg saw manageable risks and sizeable opportunities, national-level actors instead interpreted Chinese investments through the lens of systemic competition, geostrategic rivalry, and threats of espionage and foreign control, pushing them towards re-centralisation.

6. Trieste Trihub project: local leveraging of FDI competition

The Port of Trieste, Italy's first commercial port by trade volume, came under the spotlight in early 2019, when the Italian government signed the (now terminated) MoU on the BRI with China, with the port as a key component. The substantive part of the 2019 MoU between China Communication Construction Company (CCCC) and the Port of Trieste revolved around CCCC investing in the ‘Trihub’ project, which was an intermodal logistics hub aimed at improving rail connections around the port (ANSA, 2019) but, importantly, did not include any clause for direct management of the Port by CCCC. Despite the attention brought by its potential links to China, investments in the logistics hub began at least two years before the signing of the MoU; in 2017, the Port of Trieste and Italian Railways Network agreed to enlarge the Trieste Campo Marzio station, the main infrastructure serving the port. The part of the ‘Trihub’ project in which CCCC was to be engaged involved reactivating two stations to enable direct trains on the Venice-Trieste line. Importantly, before the potential CCCC connection emerged the project was presented at the EU-China Connectivity Platform and was greenlit by Brussels (Ghiretti, 2021). However, the CCCC-Trieste connection did not materialise and instead in September 2020 the German Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) acquired 50.01 per cent of the logistics platform.

This case echoes Duisburg in that the port evolved from being presented as place to be inserted into the wider BRI network to a threat by the central state on the grounds of preserving ‘national interest’. At the local level the Trieste Port Authority played these politics, but pursued a more commercial logic in terms of attracting investment, without having any preferred partners between other Europeans and the Chinese.

Initially, there was the ambition among Italian politicians and officials to use Chinese investments to make Trieste, both the port and the city, nodes of connectivity where China and Europe could meet to do business. At the regional/local level, the growth coalition included politicians, administrators and sectoral professional associations. For instance, then Governor of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the region of which Trieste is the capital, emphasised its “great strategic potential” (ANSA, 2017). Locally, the Italian Ports Association (Assoporti) participated in several fairs in China to strengthen relations between Italian ports and Chinese companies (ANSA, 2016b). These local visions chimed with national priorities, especially between 2016 and 2018 when Italy was ruled by the centre left Partito Democratico (as was Friuli). Then minister of foreign affairs, Paolo Gentiloni, claimed that “the silk road strategy can be a springboard for the development of Italy, China and the entire Mediterranean” adding that Italy sought to be a “proactive partner of such an ambitious plan” (ANSA, 2016a). During this phase a broad political consensus emerged regarding the potential benefits for Trieste, and Italy more broadly, of becoming part of the BRI.

The process of re-centralisation started in the immediate aftermath of Italy's signing of the MoU during President Xi Jinping's visit to Italy in March 2019. Such a move to endorse China's global infrastructure plan came at a time when US-China relations were deteriorating. As the Italian government was criticised for being “out of line” by both US and European partners for its decision to endorse China's global plans, there was a shift in the political dynamics around the Port of Trieste, being now interpreted as a sub-national territory to be protected in the name of the ‘national interest’. As an official at the Port of Trieste noted, “the signing of the MoU is clearly inserting an amount of politics into port investments and has brought a much higher attention from US and EU regarding what we do” (Luise et al., 2022, p. 185). The ‘national interest’ angle emerges clearly from the parliamentary speeches by Italian leaders in March 2019. Then prime minister Giuseppe Conte, for instance, argued that “[Italy's] economic and commercial attention towards this infrastructure and towards China is entirely legitimate” and that it was “justified in light of our national interests” (Camera dei Deputati, 2019).

Such a process of re-centralisation is best captured by the interaction between US representatives and the president of the Trieste Port Authority. The two met in Trieste in late 2019 and, in an interview with a local newspaper, the Ambassador stated that the US were “worried that some foreign investments might put at risk Italy's national security”. He went on to note that “Chinese infrastructural diplomacy […] aims primarily at exporting China's economic imbalances”, a reference to China's so-called ‘debt trap’ diplomacy (Il Piccolo, 2019). A few years later, the president of the Port Authority revealed that “when the American ambassador came to my office asking what benefits China had brought, I answered: ‘[the benefit was that] you came here to talk to me’” (Oriani, 2022). He added that “reading the alarmist headlines in the Anglo-Saxon press, I thought that we made it: the controversy around our port being in Chinese hands was specious, but it has turned the lights on Trieste” (Oriani, 2022). Overall, pressures from the US and European partners, coupled with domestic political changes, led to HHLA acquiring the controlling stake in the intermodal platform.

As the interweaving of global and local dynamics shows, such a U-turn on Trieste's China connection was the result of changing international alignments, coupled with domestic political developments wherein the port was strongly urged to reject CCCC's offer. However, local actors used this moment to pivot their strategy and secure alternative investment from an investor deemed less risky.

7. Budapest–Belgrade Railway Upgrade (BBRU): state centralisation and East-West balancing

The BBRU is 350 km long, with just under half on the Hungarian side. First mentioned in 2013 BBRU was originally agreed as a Memorandum of Understanding in 2014 between the Hungarian, Serbian, and Chinese governments (Rogers, 2020). Since then, the Hungarian section has experienced significant delays, largely resulting from EU resistance around compliance with its tendering regulations (Szabó & Jelinek, 2023). Hungary finally began work in October 2021 but by contrast construction on the Serbian side began in 2017 and is complete. Construction of BBRU is ongoing and slated to end by 2025, which is wildly optimistic.

From the perspective of Fidesz, the populist party ruled by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which dominates Hungary, a longstanding policy objective continues to be a reduction in foreign - read ‘Western’ - ownership of large segments of the Hungarian economy, which emerged after the systemic changes of 1989/1990, and moves towards domestic ownership complemented by stimulation of inward capital flows from the ‘East’. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis was fortuitous because it springboarded the party to the first of its four consecutive so-called ‘supermajorities’, which have enabled its illiberal turn, and also marked the entry of Chinese state capital into the European periphery (Szabó & Jelinek, 2023). Against this backdrop, Fidesz’ pro-Chinese position is driven by an urgency to acquire Chinese capital inflows with infrastructure development a key conduit. Immediately after his 2010 election win, Orbán wasted little time courting Chinese investment famously stating “although [Hungary] sails under a Western flag as an EU member state, the wind of the world economy blows from the East” (Orbán, 2010), thus foreshadowing his government's (2012-) Eastern Opening (EO) policy, an initiative to augment investment relations with states and firms located geographically to the East of Hungary i.e., non-EU. Within this framework, the BBRU has become emblematic of a wider Fidesz vision of Hungarian development.

The territorial imagining of Hungary as a ‘transport hub’ can be traced to 2010 when governmental officials began elevating the importance of its geographical location in central Europe (Inotai, 2020). Hungarian politicians stressed that the development would bring benefits beyond capital injections. As former Technology Minister László Palkovics told a Chinese broadcaster in 2021: “This is a very unique project … because it symbolises … the friendship between China, Serbia, and Hungary” (CGTN, 2023). Summarising this sentiment, Orbán declared “it is in the interest of the Hungarian nation that in the case of shipments coming from the south from China ….the route goes through Hungary, because we make money from this” (G7, 2019). At the surface level, such commentary follows an obvious business logic, but there are deeper ideological rationales driving this investment, which both underpin and transcend the territorialisation of Hungary as a transport hub.

Fidesz is using the BBRU and cognate infrastructure initiatives to help reduce its dependence on Western capital, foster new networks with China and the wider ‘East’, and concomitantly ensure its domestic political hegemony through a strengthening of the state-business networks it has nurtured since returning to office (Rogers, 2024). Jacoby and Korkut (2016, p. 499) view Fidesz’ Sinophilia as a stage towards “reimagining Hungary's geographical location”, which frames Fidesz as the agent reanimating much older Eurasian sentiments, rather than reflecting a deeper political connection with China. Going further, Visnovitz and Jenne (2021, p. 683) see Hungary's post-2010 eastward foreign policy as an attempt to “enable status elevation on the international stage”. These authors view Orbán and colleagues' pro-Chinese narratives as designed to inflate Hungary's importance through infrastructure projects, while simultaneously antagonising longer-standing allies, particularly the EU.

Increasing tension with the EU – of which Hungary has been a member for over two decades – is reflected in Orbán's unambiguous position on the BBRU: “If the EU cannot provide us with financial support [for the project], we will turn to China” (HVG, 2018). Hungary's ambition to become a transport hub has positioned the BBRU project as an infrastructural expression of Hungary's Sinophilism and a metaphor for authoritarianism: a centralised government initiative to blur the boundaries between the local, national, and supranational. As such, Fidesz does not frame China as a threat to supply chains, a rationale that has emerged in the Duisburg and Trieste case studies and reflected in the EU's de-risking agenda. However, the government has paradoxically established a similar ‘de-risking’ approach of its own exemplified through efforts to ‘diversify’ the sources of inward investment away from Western Europe.

Given Fidesz’ highly centralised structure, nationwide power base, and the impotence of domestic political opposition, it can re-centralise on its own terms to an extent but it simultaneously treads carefully vis-à-vis the EU, mixing overt rhetorical antipathy with contractual and legal appeasement via the insertion of ‘Western’ capital and expertise into the BBRU project (Railway Technology, 2022) and the assuagement of EU competition law (Rencz, 2019). Resultingly, the BBRU has emerged as perhaps the flagship (infrastructural) method with which the Hungarian state balances pressures from the EU and ‘Western’ capital and the ‘opportunities’ to augment the presence of Chinese capital.

In sum, although the BBRU is in progress, its development has been aimed at raising Hungary's status and territorialisation of the country into a transport hub. Stymied national political opposition means Fidesz has been able to promote its vision of Hungary without significant domestic dissent. Concomitantly, permitting ‘Western’ firms to enter the project through supply of various components has partially appeased the EU, which initially blocked the project. How far the BBRU as a corridor can continue to shape Hungary's international networks may become clearer as the project nears completion and stimulates additional infrastructure developments such as warehousing.

8. Discussion: de-risking, re-balancing and re-centralising state power

The three cases reveal how central-local state relations were implicated in the progress of these large transport infrastructure projects. Using the TPSN framework, in all cases we see a tension between place/scale and territory/scale even as all cases aspire to virtuous entry into global networks. The cases show that the local places – cities, ports, and rail hubs - were all seeking to deepen their network connectivity, via trade in particular, when the projects were first mooted. These anticipatory imaginaries were in step with the national strategies of both China and the respective recipient country. As Appel et al. (2018, p. 19) note, “Infrastructures are important not just for what they do in the here and now, but for what they signify about the future”. Narratives around infrastructure projects act as ways of leveraging further investment, legitimising what may be disruptive activities and speaking to diplomatic efforts to build long-term alliances between European countries and China. For example, Fidesz in Hungary and the Italian coalition which signed the MoU were explicit in their desires to strengthen links with China. In Duisburg, the national government under Merkel was positive towards China but the Duisburg city governors supercharged this narrative through the idea of ‘China city’ in their desire to kick-start a regional economy sorely affected by deindustrialisation.

In tracking the temporality of our TPSN-based analysis we see things shifting around 2020 in the cases of Duisburg and Trieste. The German and Italian governments, in line with EU strategy and in the face of growing US pressure, became more wary of Chinese inward investment. Rooted in fears around security the discourse began to shift firmly towards the management of risk, which was intensified during the Covid pandemic when the resilience of supply chains was thrown into stark relief. This rising risk agenda was first discussed in terms of ‘de-coupling’ from China (European Chamber of Commerce in China/MERICS, 2021) but by 2023 had morphed into supposedly less threatening calls for ‘de-risking’ (Financial Times, 2023b).

While the contours and mechanisms for de-risking are emergent (European Parliament, 2024; Leino, 2023), at their heart is a re-assertion of the central state. The dominant use of de-risking within the EU involves screening of new investments, import controls, investment treaties, and regulation of procurement (Von der Leyen, 2023), yet it is for individual states to implement such measures. A linked use of de-risking is to diversify supply chains to ‘like-minded’ (read ‘non-Chinese’) countries (G7, 2023); a process that states can influence but which ultimately comes down to firms to implement. A different reading of de-risking is provided by Gabor (2021) where states underwrite the risks for international capital – a form of insurance for investors - whereas the EU version of de-risking is about protection from risk in the first place. While differing in emphasis all forms of de-risking envisage a greater role for central states. Here we are seeing re-centralisation with the state playing a greater role in the direction of industrial policy which shades into forms of protectionism (Quant et al., 2024). Like Duisburg and Trieste, the BBRU is affected by supranational pressures, largely from the EU and US, but the national regime in Hungary is defensive of the project because it keeps open eastward trade links and helps balance against Western European powers. As such we saw continuity in the support for the project in which the forces driving (re)centralisation are less about de-risking, as the EU and G7 understand it, and more about securing the authority of Fidesz.

These varying re-centralisation dynamics had different implications for the local state across the three cases. The Trieste case revealed how commercial interests at the port/city level switched from being pro-China to welcoming other investors, eventually agreeing to investment from a German firm in the face of US pressure and Italy's changing national stance. The wider ‘China threat’ narrative enabled an opportunistic, place-based strategy wherein an ostensibly pro-China discourse was actually a pro-investment one. Duisburg has similarities to Trieste in that initially there was a strong national and local pro-China lobby. But as the national narrative shifted alongside US/EU pressure the central state appears to have trumped local interests which almost certainly contributed to ending COSCO's involvement. In the aftermath the local discourse reluctantly shifted towards greater wariness of Chinese investment, though the structural conditions that perpetuated the need for investment remain. We can characterise this as a disempowered, place-based position.

In the BBRU case we see a strong, national political elite which has been pro-China for over a decade using East-West tensions strategically to leverage gains by being institutionally embedded in the EU but increasing its ties to China with an almost mythical veneration for the country coupled with a hard-headed argument around capturing income from logistics. Fidesz's parliamentary dominance stifles effective domestic political opposition so investment projects meet little or no resistance. As such this is an opportunistic, national territorial strategy. Fidesz’ Sinophilia, in contrast to the growing Sinophobia of Western Europe and the US, raises questions around the links between the nature of the state and infrastructure. While Billé (2015) cautions against simplistic accounts of Sinophobia, more hawkish Western commentators infer those authoritarian states, like Hungary, prefer Chinese concessional lending for its ‘non-interference’ in domestic politics compared to Western lenders, whereas China allegedly prefers dealing with authoritarian states due to their supposed political affinities. In practice the issue is more about domestic politics and infrastructure wherein authoritarian leaders, such as in Turkey (Adaman & Akbulut, 2021) or Tanzania (Dye, 2022), are using grand infrastructure schemes to buttress their legitimacy and authority. China is a willing financier and constructor of such schemes in its attempts to open markets and gain political favour, though a more global comparison is needed to push this insight further.

These observations on the linkages between state power and infrastructure investment follow work on Chinese power projection (Goh, 2014; Ho, 2020; Lee, 2022) which have mainly focused on state-to-state relations. What Mann (1984) adds is a focus on internal state relations to help us understand these dynamics, arguing that what makes the state unique is its territorially-centralised form of organization and that infrastructural power – the capacity of the state to penetrate civil society and implement decisions across its realm – is now immense. The technologies of this power vary, but transportation infrastructure (ports, roads, etc) are key. Mann's focus on the origins of state power was not intended to deal with the effects of globalisation and restructuring of the state (Brenner, 1999, 2019) which questions territorial centrality, but our cases reveal a re-assertion of the state's power through the supply and control of infrastructure. In some states, particularly in the global South, Chinese-backed infrastructure enables the reach of the state whereas in our two Western European cases such infrastructure is seen as a threat to state security.

Our analysis suggests that power is being re-centralised in contrast to decentralisation as a means to attract inward investment. The neo-liberal governance model has partly been around passing service provision onto private actors but re-centralising in ‘arm's length’ ways through regulation (Swyngedouw, 2004; Groves et al., 2013). With this move to de-risking, the recentralisation we are seeing is not at arm's length but far more direct and (geo)political. Despite multiplex forms of re-scaling, state hierarchies are “re-assembled in terms of spatial reach …. (and) … extended downwards over space” (Allen & Cochrane, 2010, p. 1073, original emphasis).

9. Conclusion

China's global rise and the concomitant ruffling of the established world order has manifested in alarmist narratives in the West in which Chinese-backed infrastructure has become a leitmotif for a range of perceived risks. Europe is not immune from such tensions with political discourse focusing on how China ‘weaponises’ its infrastructure projects and subsequent calls to ‘de-risk’ such investments. We have argued that much existing work on China-Europe relations tends to be framed in binary geopolitical and/or national terms which reinforces the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994). Alternative spatial ontologies of zones, enclaves and corridors seek to capture the emergent geographies of nodes and connections but run the risk of underplaying the range of internal state relations.

To bring the focus back to intra-state relations we used Jessop et al.’s (2008) TPSN approach to interrogate the socio-spatial processes around three cases of Chinese-backed transport infrastructure in Europe. Initially we saw alignment of interests and discourses of different actors operating at different scales centring on place and network in which the proposed transport infrastructure would connect places more effectively. In the two Western European cases as consensus on the desirability of Chinese inward investment began to break down, we saw dissonance between interests and discourses wherein the local became a site of tension vis-à-vis other scales of governance. In these cases, the move to ‘de-risk’ Chinese investments saw a re-centralisation of state power. Here the ‘China threat’ was used as a smokescreen for protectionism and in the case of Trieste it helped leverage new investment from Germany. The Hungarian case was somewhat different in that an already centralised state has used major infrastructure projects to legitimise its hold on power while the connectivity promised by the Chinese-backed railway project was materially and symbolically important for countering what Fidesz sees as excessive interference from the EU. These contrasts between Western and Eastern European cases also suggest that moves towards ‘de-risking’ are more evident in countries that have direct competition with China. For Germany, given its deep mutual economic ties with China, ‘de-risking’ is neither unanimous nor straightforward. By contrast Hungary is positioned as a sub-contracting hub for Western European firms and now as a logistics conduit for Asian trade, neither of which structurally challenge China and so the politics is more of balancing and hedging than de-risking.

The tension around de-risking is that the US and supranational organisations, such as the European Union and G7, are setting the tone, but states are tasked with the securitisation of inward investment and firms with finding alternative supply chains, whereas localities are more agnostic about the origins of foreign investment. States acting independently will not necessarily lead to de-risking because unless all states de-risk evenly then the back door will be left open for Chinese firms to re-route supply chains through countries that are not de-risking and effectively conceal the origins of the goods. Our paper suggests that when addressing what is strategically important for European countries in the face of China's internationalisation such strategic needs must be assessed in multi-scalar ways and attend to the local level where interests are sometimes at odds with the priorities at national and supranational scales.