As Chinese leaders endeavor to maintain the international environment aligned with their strategic aim of realizing the "dream of national rejuvenation," the remarkable increase in China's capabilities, coupled with uncertainty in the global economy and the ambivalent attitude of the USA toward the international order, poses fresh challenges to Beijing's foreign policy. The present paper argues that a lexicographic preference for the mitigation of the risk of pushback against China's core interests underpins the Belt and Road Initiative. Pursuing a strategy of credible reassurance commensurate to the shift in the distribution of power in China's neighborhood and globally, President Xi Jinping's administration has been cultivating a form of connective leadership that commits China to the encapsulation of the Belt and Road Initiative for transregional connectivity into its own national development strategy, generating an octroyé, non-hegemonic, type of international social capital, and integrating the existing order without corroborating the position of its founder.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is mainly considered as a commercialconnectivity and sustainability-oriented infrastructure development bank, but there are also international security dimensions to the Bank. China's geo-strategic and security motivations are said to be behind its spearheading of the AIIB. This essay highlights that China's national and international security calculations have evolved in the period after the Bank's opening. In the initial phase of the AIIB's formation, 2013-2017, the Bank's creation was part of Beijing's pursuit of a more outwardly ambitious and bold national/international security agenda of new institutionbuilding, looking to reshape the system of global governance. But since 2017, China's leadership has responded to sustained international pushback against its ambitious agenda, especially but not exclusively from the United States, and it has refocused its national security priorities onto protecting national economic growth, national sovereignty and regime preservation. Beijing has supported moves to put some distance between the AIIB from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Chinese strategists have shifted to seeing the AIIB as helpful for mitigating an economic downturn across Eurasia, and preserving China's continuing growth, and regime survival in what they perceive as a period of external threat.

Italy's controversial decision to sign a Memorandum of Understanding for collaboration on the Belt and Road Initiative with China in 2019 has been widely debated. This article seeks to break new ground by offering a theory-informed contribution investigating the rationale behind Beijing's own commitment in the negotiations leading to the signing of the BRI MoU. It argues that the Chinese government accepted the risks involved in the process for the sake of promoting an accelerated advancement in China's positioning in the international status hierarchy through negotiation of deference against agency with Italy. The article empirically probes the extent to which such a strategy of status enhancement on China's part is sustainable over time. Based on a content analysis of all China-related political stances expressed in ordinary non-legislative policy-setting acts tabled in both Houses of the 18th Italian Parliament, from March 2018 through to August 2021, the article suggests that China's strategy is hardly sustainable. In fact, the steady deterioration of China-related sentiment among Italian Members of Parliament as a consequence of Beijing's policies towards Hong Kong, the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak, and Xinjiang matches the expectations of previous scholarship on international status as it confirms that social closure mechanisms discussed in the literature prevail over foreign policy consistency when the status-seeking actor is perceived as crossing critical normative thresholds.

China's gradual integration with the global market is responsible for exceptional rates of economic growth and for the substantial sociopolitical stability enjoyed by the country over the past decades. Nevertheless, the choice to increasingly adhere to the competitive dynamic of the market has thrown up a battery of problems for China's leadership, as increasing affluence has favored the pluralization and diversification of social interests. In a country where the existence of divergent and competing social claims has traditionally been regarded as a grave threat to stability, marketization, whereas on the one hand acting as a source of political legitimacy, has, on the other, paved the way for a potentially more strained relationship between relevant corporative interests and the central government. By studying China's recent development from the complementary perspectives of the "horizontal" and "vertical" forms of decentralization and devolution, this paper aims to highlight the tensions with which China has had to contend since its adoption of reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s. It aims also to suggest how the Chinese leadership's instinct for continued social control has cut against market reform just enough to effect a process of controlled macroeconomic integration that has been more successful than wholesale resistance or immediate unquestioning acceptance would have been. Copyright 2006 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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