Has China’s grand “Silk Road” project reached Denmark?

China seems poised to play a more active role in shaping the geo-economic landscapes of international relations. One prominent example is the ambitious OBOR project – “One Belt, One Road” or “New Silk Road” – which aims to strengthen the infrastructural, and thereby also economic, connectivity between China and Europe. Three years after the formal launch of the OBOR, a group of European China scholars has taken stock of how the OBOR is playing out in the EU, publishing their findings in a joint report entitled “Europe and China’s new Silk Road”.

In one of the chapters of the report, DIIS researchers Andreas Bøje Forsby and Yang Jiang take a look at the OBOR from a Danish perspective. Here, they argue that, apart from its membership of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Denmark has so far not been directly involved in the OBOR project, neither at the political level, nor at the business level. This places Denmark – together with Sweden – at the periphery of the EU and raises the question if Denmark is missing out on an important opportunity to tap into the economic potential of the OBOR.