China’s Ambition in Promoting Green Finance for Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

Over the last three decades, China has experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization at the expense of massive environmental degradation. However, over the last decade, China’s attitude towards environmental degradation has changed drastically and it started to play a pioneering role in the use of environmentally friendly technologies and their financing. The best example of this is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Lately, China promotes green finance as an important feature of the BRI and thus gets firmly welcome from partner countries. The present chapter contributes to our understanding of China’s ambition in greening the BRI. In this context, the current study investigates the green credit and green bond policy of Chinese banks. It is a particular interest of this chapter to have a close look at the role of state-owned banks in greening the BRI.