Sixteen reference cases — four per dimension (infrastructure, digital, production, finance). Each box carries a curated thesis and links to recent (2020+) peer-reviewed work from international- political-economy and economic-geography journals in OpenAlex.
Reference cases for each of the four dimensions — linked to recent (2020+) peer-reviewed work in IPE / economic-geography journals. view all 16 cases →
Greece — COSCO, Chinese maritime centrality in Europe
COSCO's 2009 concession over Piraeus terminals, upgraded to a majority stake in the Piraeus Port Authority in 2016, turned the Mediterranean's busiest container port into Europe's first live test-case of Chinese infrastructural centrality — and the EU's regulatory response to it.
Hungary & Serbia — CEE's flagship BRI rail project
The 370 km Budapest–Belgrade line is the first BRI rail megaproject on EU territory, funded by Chinese policy banks under secrecy clauses negotiated by Orbán and Vučić. It crystallises the 'illiberal gateway' thesis: CEE hubs as entry points for Chinese capital into European production.
Kenya — East African Standard-Gauge Railway
The $4.7bn Standard-Gauge Railway, built by CRBC and financed by China Exim Bank, is the textbook BRI debt-and-corridor case in East Africa — a reference point in debates over debt-trap diplomacy, labour regimes, and the territorialisation of global production networks.
Peru — COSCO's Pacific gateway to Latin America
Opened in November 2024, the $3.5bn Chancay deepwater port (60% COSCO) reconfigures Pacific shipping by cutting the Asia–South America voyage by ~10 days and bypassing Panama. Latin America's most consequential Chinese infrastructure bet and a live test of hemispheric US–China centrality.
Reference cases for each of the four dimensions — linked to recent (2020+) peer-reviewed work in IPE / economic-geography journals. view all 16 cases →
EU / UK — telecom vendor diplomacy
Huawei's dominance in 5G RAN became the first major case of hardware-layer decoupling: UK / Sweden / Baltics full bans, Germany / France / Netherlands partial restrictions, a bifurcated European market. The flashpoint where industrial policy met national-security screening in digital centrality.
Taiwan — US export controls on advanced semiconductors
The October 2022 BIS rules, the CHIPS Act, and subsequent Netherlands / Japan alignments on ASML and Tokyo Electron together turned the Taiwan-centred advanced-node foundry network into the front line of economic statecraft. 'Weaponised interdependence' in its purest hardware form.
United States — platform sovereignty vs. Chinese ownership
Trump's 2020 executive orders, Biden's 2024 PAFACAA divest-or-ban law, and the Supreme Court's January 2025 affirmation made TikTok the defining case of platform-sovereignty contestation. Scholarship frames it as the digital-layer counterpart to infrastructural 'chokepoint' politics.
Indo-Pacific — SubCom vs HMN Tech routing wars
The SEA-ME-WE 6 reroute, the PEACE cable landing disputes, and US pressure to exclude HMN Tech (ex-Huawei Marine) from consortium builds made submarine cables the physical-layer proxy for digital centrality — 99% of intercontinental data, a few dozen ships, a handful of landing stations.
Reference cases for each of the four dimensions — linked to recent (2020+) peer-reviewed work in IPE / economic-geography journals. view all 16 cases →
China — 85% of global mid-stream capacity
From the 2010 Senkaku export cut-off to the 2024 Sm-Co magnet export-licence regime, China's grip on rare-earth separation and permanent-magnet manufacture remains the canonical 'chokepoint' in production networks — and the driver behind the EU Critical Raw Materials Act and IRA sourcing rules.
China — CATL / BYD and the IRA response
China's ~75% share of cell manufacture and near-total lock on cathode precursors forced a tri-bloc response: IRA content rules in the US, the EU Net-Zero Industry Act and battery passport, and CATL's controversial European greenfields. The production-network case par excellence.
Chile · Argentina · Bolivia — upstream resource politics
Chile's 2023 'lithium nationalisation', Argentina's Milei-era liberalisation, and Bolivia's 2024 partnership deals with Russian and Chinese consortia show how the world's richest lithium salar reserves have become a testbed for resource-nationalism vs. bloc-aligned processing deals.
Xinjiang — forced-labour sanctions on solar supply
~40% of global polysilicon is refined in Xinjiang. The US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA, 2022) and its rebuttable-presumption regime — plus EU due-diligence law — have made solar the first case where human-rights-grounded import bans rewrote a clean-tech production network.
Reference cases for each of the four dimensions — linked to recent (2020+) peer-reviewed work in IPE / economic-geography journals. view all 16 cases →
Russia — the first G7 SWIFT disconnection in wartime
The February 2022 removal of seven Russian banks from SWIFT (expanded since) was the most aggressive use of the messaging network since Iran 2012. It vindicated the 'weaponised interdependence' thesis and accelerated RMB-settlement, CIPS growth, and BRICS payment-alternative work.
China — cross-border payment system expansion
China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System now has 1,600+ participants and grew >40%/yr 2022–2024. Paired with e-CNY pilots and Shanghai Gold Exchange settlement, CIPS is the monetary-network backbone of the 'alternative financial infrastructure' literature.
BRICS+ — enlargement and payment-system alternatives
The 2023 Johannesburg enlargement (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE), the 2024 Kazan technical discussions on BRICS Pay / BRICS Bridge / mBridge, and the Russia-chaired push for a unit-of-account proxy have made BRICS+ the central de-dollarisation venue — though academic work remains sceptical about its near-term scale.
OFAC — the extraterritorial enforcement regime
From CAATSA to the 2023 Executive Order 14114 on Russia-evasion banks and 2024 enforcement actions against Chinese and Emirati lenders, US secondary sanctions have become a de-facto extraterritorial banking regime. The central case for 'dollar dominance as a weapon' in the Drezner / Farrell-Newman tradition.