Paul Tsai China Center Fellow Publishes Book on Belt and Road Initiative

A new book by Moritz Rudolf, Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, sheds new light on how China has been utilizing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to reshape the global order.

Drawing on an in-depth analysis of hundreds of primary documents, The Belt and Road Initiative: Implications for the International Order offers a comprehensive overview of China’s most crucial foreign policy agenda item. The book demonstrates how, through the initiative, China has projected its self-perception onto the international order, established China-centered BRI networks across a wide range of policy areas, and increased the country’s international discursive power. 

The author started as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center in fall 2021. His work there focuses on the implications of China’s rise for the international legal order. In 2020, he completed the Second German State Examination in Law and obtained his Ph.D. in international law from Humboldt University of Berlin. His Ph.D. thesis is titled “The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative — Political, Historical and International Legal Aspects.” He was previously an Associate in the Asia Division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs; Fellow at the Intlaw Research Group “The International Rule of Law — Rise or Decline?,” which examines the role of international law in a changing global order; and Researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. He has studied law, Mandarin Chinese, and economics at Heidelberg University, Humboldt University of Berlin, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Language and Culture University. 

Rudolf has been a close observer of the Belt and Road Initiative since 2013. He has spent several years of research in Berlin and Beijing, as well as at the United Nations in Geneva and New York. He has further participated in official BRI forums on international legal cooperation, in which he gained unique insights into the PRC’s most important foreign policy agenda item.