Drawing on the literature on strategic hedging and adapting it to China’s use of economic diplomacy in the service of comprehensive national security goals within the regionalised foreign policy approach of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we examine China’s approach to securing and expanding its interests in the Persian Gulf. To implement the trade and infrastructure connectivity goals of the BRI and to secure the continued flow of diversified energy supplies, China needs to boost relations with both regional powerhouses, Iran and Saudi Arabia, without alienating either of them or the regional hegemon, the United States. The resulting strategy of strategic hedging is based in the Chinese approach to economic diplomacy, which utilises Chinese commercial actors in the service of national strategic objectives. Relations require careful and ongoing management if China is to achieve outcomes which benefit all sides while avoiding becoming entangled in the region’s intractable geopolitical problems.

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This special issue examines the impacts and implementation of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Asian and European regions towards which the initiative is primarily directed. Introduced by President Xi Jinping in a pair of speeches in late 2013 (Xi, 2014: 315-324), and previously entitled "One Belt, One Road," the BRI was conceived as transport corridors to be constructed based on ancient Silk Road trade routes. Hence, the "belt" is defined as the land route (or routes) from China across Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East to Europe, while the "road" somewhat confusingly refers to the maritime route that passes from the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean and hence to East Africa and the Mediterranean. The main routes of the BRI, at least as roughly outlined in the National Development and Reform Commission's (NDRC) publication Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21 st Century Maritime Silk Road (2015), are shown in Figure 1. Despite the rhetorical broadening of the BRI since 2016 to supposedly include other regions such as Africa, the Americas, and the Arctic, the transportation "corridors" outlined in the Vision and Actions publication (National Development and Reform Commission [NDRC], 2015) are all in Europe and Asia. This implies that the initiative is primarily Eurasian in its scope and that the core aim of the BRI is to connect China with Europe (Yilmaz et al., 2018). Although no official map of the BRI exists, those circulated by Chinese state media during the BRI's early years invariably emphasise (similarly to Figure 1) land and sea routes from Asia to Europe. Despite Chinese attempts to stretch the initiative's scope beyond its logical geographical limits, the five key BRI