About
China’s Geoeconomic Rise and the Accumulation of Structural Power (China-GRASP) Empirical Analyses at the Macro and Micro Level
China-GRASP is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for an initial period of five years and is jointly hosted by the University of Göttingen and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.Its research examines how China’s growing geoeconomic influence is reshaping global economic and political relations. By exploring different dimensions of China’s international reach, the program seeks to identify and analyze emerging shifts in structural power.
China’s geoeconomic ascent is reshaping global economic dynamics and the international political order. From the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spanning multiple continents to its dominant position in critical supply chains and emerging technologies, China’s economic footprint now extends to virtually every region of the world. This shift in the global balance of power has ushered in a new era of great power competition, with the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) increasingly viewing China’s rise as a strategic challenge requiring coordinated economic and security responses. As a result, debates over economic security, technological sovereignty, and the resilience of liberal international institutions have intensified.
The RTG’s core research agenda investigates China’s structural power—its ability to acquire and exploit central positions in networks of interdependence to influence the policies of other actors and align them with its preferences. In line with our program title, China-GRASP aims quite literally to grasp how China’s expanding network centrality translates into political influence. This perspective emphasizes that interdependence can be a tool of leverage and dominance across issue areas, that network centrality can be used to block others’ power, and that hegemonic rise often occurs incrementally and non-coercively, rather than through overt conflict. We operationalize structural power along Strange’s (1987) four key dimensions: security, the production of goods and services, finance and credit, and knowledge and information.
The RTG is divided into five clusters , each organized around three thematic focus areas.