Overseas economic interest perspective in foreign policy—a case study of China

We argue that overseas economic interests and traditional non-economic aspects such as political sovereignty and territorial integrity constitute important parts of a country’s integrative national security set. To enable a better understanding of the overseas economic dimension of a country’s foreign policy rationale, we develop an analytic framework inspired by the Multi-Objective Optimization by Ratio Analysis approach (Multi-MOORA), which quantifies a country’s overseas economic interests adjusted by country-specific risk factors. Using China as an example, aided by a dataset covering 172 countries with economic ties with China spanning a period from 2013 to 2017, we show that its foreign policy focus in developing countries since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) motivated by geopolitical and ideological considerations as well as significant economic interest. Protection of these overseas economic interests is imperative to establish an advantage over Western firms which presently avoid many of the countries in question.