According to our speaker, Tanguy Struye de Swielande, China is developing its foreign policy to achieve the role of world leader by 2049. Despite Chinese rhetoric about the Belt and Road Initiative being a project which will benefit the international community and that is in line with the current international order, realpolitik factors inform and drive the project, as China reinforces its exports, increases its sphere of influence, and increasingly sets tomorrow’s norms. In doing so, China projects an image of a country with the objective and the resources of a great power that is ready and willing to take the lead in international affairs.

Our speaker will present the Chinese grand strategy based on the logic of the game of Go.   (Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.)

Tanguy Struye de Swielande is a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain la Neuve, and the Catholic University Faculties of Mons and the Royal Military School.  He is also senior researcher at the Center for Crisis and International Conflicts (CECRI) and coordinator of the InBev Baillet-Latour Chair, "European Union-China Program" and founder of the GENSYS network.  He specializes in the geopolitics and foreign policy of the great powers and in the analysis of decision-making.  He is the author of, among others, the Bush administration's foreign policy, analysis of decision-making (2001-2005),  China and the repositioning of the great powers in Africa: geostrategic and geoeconomic analysis,  and co-directing the book: China on the international scene: towards a responsible power?

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