China's outbound investment exceeded inbound investment for the first time in 2015. In years leading up this transition, a maturing demographic transition alongside slowing internal migration and diminishing returns to physical capital investment, all had a role in China's diminished competitiveness in low-wage manufactured exports and the fading of the related growth model. In that context, the 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) took place in two stages in two developing countries, Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These launch choices, and the BRI in general are herein elaboratedin terms of economic history, geography, and demography. The BRI in turn is considered to be aiming to foster the ongoing development of China, and in doing so also seeks to instigate new era development opportunity for other developing countries. One facilitation channel for the latter is China's concept of "patient capital," essentially concessional capital, or foreign aid. For China that offers a means via which to internationalise the financial sector and also the Renminbi. Lessons from China's own use of foreign aid and economic development hence serve as an important reference for ongoing scoping of the shape and trajectory of the BRI. To that end, this article sheds light on what is in the BRI for China. ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Africa's largest trade partner, China, criticised for exchanging resources for manufactures, has promised to increase imports and optimise the structure of trade with Africa. Using a gravity model of China's imports for the years 1995-2009, we explore potential dynamics for this promise, uniquely accounting for market economy recognition and Taiwan recognition. The former is associated with increased imports, while the latter effect is ambiguous and statistically insignificant. Comparison of projected against actual imports across three growth-path-aligned economic geography typologies -resource-rich; landlocked and resource-poor; coastal and resource-poor -sets out China's imports trends in an abstract framework of African export potential. We find not only 'under' importing across a majority of resource-poor countries. We also find that current trade policy is the least applicable to these comparatively poor exporters' trade with China. If the latter are to serve a broader catalytic role in Africa's regional industrial transformation as compared to the role of coastal and resource poor countries in regional economic transformation in Asia and Latin America, China-Africa trade and investment policies may need additional thinking.

Around 1980 China adopted economic reforms and restrictive population policy.Consequential demographic transition at low incomes brought fears that China becoming 'not rich, first old' derailing development. Here the related discourse is advanced into the 'economic demography transition' and the economic demography matrix (EDM) used to study 'old' China's high-income prospects. EDM transition analysis of 182 economies over 1996-2016 finds: 1) China is among many 'poor-old' economies; 2) a majority of countries recently entering the high-income group did were first 'poor-old'. Given population ageing across major economies, developed and developing, these results highlight the importance of accounting for economic demography.

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