China’s grand strategy is evolving towards greater activism under Xi Jinping – from ‘keeping a low profile’ to ‘striving for achievement’. New initiatives such as forging ‘a new type of international relations’, ‘a community with a shared future for mankind’, and the Belt and Road Initiative have become marked features of the ‘Xi-change’ in China’s grand strategy. From an economic statecraft perspective, this article hypothesises that the Xi-change led to a power centralisation in the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Railroad Economic Belt. To support its geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives, the Chinese state has replicated the domestic state-industrial complex. In the context of the Jakarta–Bandung High-speed Rail Corridor, the domestic roles of the National Development and Reform Commission and the China Railway Corporation have been internationalised to ensure the globalisation of China’s high-speed rail industry could be conducted in a concerted and choreographed fashion.

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PurposeWhat are the mechanisms through which Chinese municipal leaders overcome implementation breakdown? This study, through process tracing, archival work and semi-structured interviews, examines the implementation of three sub-municipal-level railway projects involving the same principals and agents over the same period of time.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis was guided by the hypothesis that political coordination and the exercise of political and Party leadership played an indispensable role in the two cases of successful policy implementation, and its absence accounts for the case of implementation breakdown.FindingsThe principal finding is that an informal “strategic group” was created to “herd” cadres to overcome the problem of implementation. Herding here refers to the idea that Party leadership, through the use of moral persuasion, encourages cadres moving towards a desired common goal and direction.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited in the number of secondary resources (government documents and government and media releases) available to the field interviewees, which the author heavily relied on to complete the study.Originality/valueBuilding on the conceptual work of “strategic groups” by Thomas Heberer, Anna Ahlers, and Gunter Schubert, this study makes an empirical contribution by tracing the process through which an informal strategic group exercises its power to overcome implementation breakdown.

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