Nadège Rolland

When China unveiled the Belt and Road Initiative, most Western analysts reached for spreadsheets. They counted the ports and the railways, totted up the loans, and argued about whether the whole sprawling enterprise amounted to economic development or a “debt trap.” Nadège Rolland reached for the Chinese strategic literature instead — the journals, the Party documents, the theoretical debates — and came back with a different and more unsettling answer. The Belt and Road, she argued, is not fundamentally about infrastructure at all. It is the physical scaffolding for a Sinocentric order across Eurasia: a sphere of influence built in concrete and fibre-optic cable rather than declared in a treaty.

That reframing — from project list to grand strategy — set the terms of the Western debate about the most ambitious geopolitical undertaking of the century. And it came from an unusual vantage: a French defence-ministry analyst, trained to read the world from the continental heart of Eurasia rather than from the maritime edge where American strategists tend to stand.

A Strategist From the Land Power’s Vantage¶

Rolland spent two decades as an analyst and senior adviser on Asian and Chinese strategic affairs to the French Ministry of Defence before joining the National Bureau of Asian Research in Washington, where she is now a distinguished fellow for China studies. She came to China-watching, in other words, as a government strategist rather than an academic — and it shows in her instinct for intentions, capabilities, and the long game.

Her method is the foundation of everything. Rolland reads Chinese strategists in their own language and on their own terms, mining theoretical and military journals for the assumptions beneath the slogans. She has described the technique as peeling an artichoke: you strip away the outer layers of economic and developmental rhetoric to reach the strategic core. Chinese strategists, she notes, rarely write a paper that says plainly “here is what China should do”; the prescriptions are embedded in historical case studies and oblique conclusions, and the analyst’s job is to surface them. It is painstaking work, and it is what lets her claim to describe Beijing’s design rather than merely its press releases.

The Belt and Road as Scaffolding¶

China’s Eurasian Century?, published in 2017, was billed as the first Western analysis to examine the strategic thought driving the Belt and Road from Chinese-language sources — and its central claim was deliberately provocative. The initiative, Rolland argued, is “more than a list of revamped infrastructure projects”; it is a grand strategy serving China’s vision of itself as the preponderant power in Eurasia and a global power second to none.

Two features of her reading stand out. The first is that the Belt and Road’s famous vagueness is a feature, not a bug. She called it an “amorphous and ambiguous construct” that even some Chinese analysts struggle to define — and argued the ambiguity is, arguably, purposeful, letting Beijing keep its options open and deflect alarm while the dependencies accumulate. The second is the continental logic. Channelling the Chinese strategists she reads, Rolland emphasises that power, in this worldview, comes not from the sea but from the land — from the economic activity and connectivity of the Eurasian landmass, the world-island that a dominant continental power could organise around itself as a counterweight to American naval supremacy in maritime Asia. It is Mackinder’s pivot reconceived for an age of high-speed rail and fibre-optic cable, and it reframes the Belt and Road Initiative as the map of a desired sphere of influence.

Crucially, Rolland is no naïf about feasibility. Her own book catalogues the obstacles — thin regional expertise, the dubious economics of many projects, local resistance, security risks. The point is not that the grand strategy will succeed, but that it exists.

From Eurasia to a New World Order¶

Rolland’s later work generalised the argument from one region to the whole system. In China’s Vision for a New World Order she gave her order-concept its sharpest definition, and it is more precise than most accounts of “Chinese hegemony” allow. What Beijing seeks, in her reading, is not to topple and replace the entire liberal order but to carve out a partial, hierarchical, loosely held Sinocentric subsystem — modelled in part on the old imperial tributary system — covering its desired sphere, while co-opting and reshaping existing institutions everywhere else.

The texture of that order is the interesting part. Control would be exercised “loosely, rather than directly,” through dependencies that can serve as either incentives or coercive tools. It would favour informal arrangements conducted in the shadow of China’s disproportionate power, and it would reject the universality of human rights — pushing, for instance, a “right to development” framing inside the UN system in place of individual liberties. A secretary-general, not an emperor, sits at the centre; the periphery defers. It is illiberal without being a mirror image of the order it seeks to displace — which is precisely what makes it hard for Western strategists, expecting a rival superpower in their own image, to see clearly.

Her recent work has pushed further into the conceptual machinery Chinese strategists actually use — “comprehensive national power,” which Beijing obsessively quantifies against its rivals, and “discourse power,” the capacity to shape global narratives — and into mapping China’s “strategic space,” the imagined zone beyond its borders that its leaders consider vital to its rise.

The Digital Silk Road and the Export of Norms¶

If the railways and ports are the visible Belt and Road, Rolland has been among the clearest voices on its less visible layer: the “Digital Silk Road,” the fibre-optic cables, data centres, e-commerce platforms, and surveillance systems through which China exports not just connectivity but a model of governing it. The technology, in her reading, carries norms with it — a vision of the internet as a space of state control and “cyber-sovereignty” rather than open flow, propagated through standards bodies, training programmes, and the quiet preferences embedded in Chinese kit. It is the infrastructure of digital sovereignty, built outward.

Her account of Chinese motivation is more interesting than the usual “expansionist superpower” framing. In her analysis of Beijing’s conduct during the pandemic — what she called its “power play” — she argued the driver was as much insecurity as ambition: a leadership that fears encirclement and ideological contagion, and that seeks a sphere where its model is safe rather than a world remade in its image. That is why the order she describes is partial and defensive at its core, even as its methods are assertive. It is the behaviour of a power trying to secure a heartland, not evangelise a creed — which makes it, in a sense, more durable and harder to deter than a missionary empire would be.

This insistence on reading intentions from the inside, rather than projecting Western assumptions onto Chinese conduct, is Rolland’s signature contribution to how the West argues about the export of authoritarian governance: not “China is spreading autocracy” as a slogan, but a specific account of which tools travel, to whom, and why.

Influence¶

Rolland’s achievement was to move the Western conversation off the terrain of debt ratios and onto the terrain of strategy. China’s Eurasian Century? is widely credited as the first rigorous, Chinese-sources-based treatment of the Belt and Road as grand design, and it reshaped how both Washington and European capitals read the initiative. As a French analyst publishing through an American institution and European outlets alike, she is unusually placed to bridge the transatlantic conversation about China — and her testimony to Congress and her think-tank work have carried the order-concept directly into policy.

The Critics¶

The central objection to Rolland is the same one that dogs all attempts to read coherent strategy into China’s behaviour: the risk of mistaking aspiration for plan. A substantial body of scholarship treats the Belt and Road not as a centrally directed master strategy but as a fragmented sprawl — a branding exercise onto which provinces, state-owned enterprises, and local officials latch for their own reasons. The CSIS analyst Jonathan Hillman put the counter-case most memorably, arguing that the further you stretch the initiative geographically and functionally, the less control Beijing actually has — less grand design than overstretch.

By reconstructing intent from theoretical writing, the charge runs, Rolland may infer more directed agency than the messy implementation supports. Her implicit rebuttal is twofold: that the ambiguity is itself intentional, and that critics conflate “strategy” with “flawless execution.” A plan can be real and still fail. The honest verdict is that she has built the strongest sourced case for intentionality — and that the case remains contestable precisely because authoritarian intentions always are.

Why She Matters¶

Rolland gave the West a way to see the Belt and Road as Beijing’s strategists see it: not as charity, not as a debt trap, but as the slow construction of a sphere of influence in which dependence is the instrument and ambiguity the cover. In an era of great-power competition increasingly fought through infrastructure, standards, and connectivity, hers is the indispensable reading of how a continental power tries to organise the world-island around itself — and a standing challenge to the comfortable assumption that we would recognise a bid for hegemony if we saw one.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative” (2017) — the foundational book reading the Belt and Road from Chinese-language sources. (See Recommended Reading below.)

• “China’s Vision for a New World Order” (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2020) — her fullest statement of the partial, loose, hierarchical Sinocentric order.

• “A New World Order According to Beijing” (ICDS, 2021) — a short, sharp distillation of the order-concept in her own words.

• “Mapping China’s Strategic Space” (NBR, 2024) — her recent synthesis on comprehensive national power and discourse power.

• Jonathan Hillman, The Emperor’s New Road (2020) — the leading “overstretch, not master plan” counter-reading, essential for balance.