This is an important book, but not because it is readable, timely or prescient. Its importance is as a policy snapshot of senior policymakers in Beijing planning the geo-economic architecture of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). International Capacity Cooperation (ICC) was China's international trade, industry and finance geo-policy blueprint. The policy had huge implications for the global economy as well as for the regional economies of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East and East Africa. This book is a translation of the 2017 publication by China Machine Press (“Yi dai yi lu” yu guoji channeng hezuo: guobie hezuo zhinan), now marketed in English as The Countries’ Cooperation Guide of the Belt and Road Initiative and International Capacity Cooperation. ICC was launched in 2014 as the practical economic architecture underpinning Xi Jinping's BRI. It had built on Jiang-era “Going out” and “Bringing in,” which together had become colloquially known in English as “Going global.” In 2020 though, the ICC foreign geo-industrial policy has at least temporarily been wound down and folded back in to “Going global.”

The study is important not for the attempts at global command economy planning, but for who has written it. The book is an exercise in collective authorship by senior National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) officials, and it is best read as a codification of policy which had been incubated, developed and deployed to Belt and Road economies. Xu Shaoshi was director of the NDRC at the time of the book's Chinese release. Co-editors of the book are He Lifeng who has been NDRC director since 2017, Ning Jizhe, National Bureau of Statistics director and Wang Xiaotao, China International Development Cooperation Agency director. The younger ranked authors of the book – Guo Jianmin, Zheng Qi, Liu Shen and Chen Chao – will also maintain policy relevance into the 20th Party Congress and beyond. This is highest-level policy making, and the coordination between “aid,” trade and industry here is indicative of coordinated state industrial policy. This higher-level policymaking is made clear when we see a whole chapter on the Middle East “1+2+3 Cooperation Pattern,” which had previously been released by Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the “Middle East White Paper.” This book makes clear who is really making China's foreign, trade, industrial and finance policy. What is missing from the study though is any genuine policy prescription, analysis or integration of the policy banks’ role in this global geo-policy.

A key piece of spatial planning rhetoric that the English reader should internalize is the macro-layout of BRI through ICC as a “main axis” through Eurasia, a “West wing” comprised of the Middle East and extending into East Africa, and an “East wing” of Latin America. This is the hierarchy of priorities for Belt and Road through ICC: Central Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe, followed by Middle East and East Africa, with an auxiliary of Latin America. Part five is probably of most use to contemporary researchers, focusing on high-technology transfers in high-speed rail, nuclear power, and equipment. This section would have reached a much larger audience as a standalone booklet. Section 39 on forming overseas industrial clusters is also useful, demonstrating the structure behind the deployment of overseas Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to mimic the domestic SEZs which had been the backbone of China's capital import model. These overseas SEZs are being deployed as the institutional architecture for a distributed overseas production base model. The acute focus of this policy is explored in China–France third-party market cooperation, which leveraged China's mid-tier and France's high-tier technology into a techno-industrial policy of joint development and capacity cooperation in Belt and Road economies for export to the global economy.

Ultimately this book, like the policy, is a shadow of what could have been. The goals expressed here were to develop a China-led global industrial value chain. Unfortunately for the NDRC, China has only the industry, and neither the value nor the global access to create an effective chain. This does not come across as cutting-edge 21st-century techno-industrial policy, but more like a continuation of the GOELRO to GOSPLAN to NDRC institutional development and feels like 1920s policy being repackaged for 2020. What was prescribed here will not eventuate, but neither will it be completely abandoned. This is a codification of policy wreckage, and it joins the Soviet industrial institutions which already litter the Eurasian landscape.