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A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.***China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a key tool for the expansion of Chinese global influence. More than ten years into the initiative, which Beijing launched in 2013, the BRI is evolving beyond its initial focus on financing infrastructure projects and has expanded well beyond Asia. We asked five experts to forecast China’s priorities for the BRI in 2025.Read more below.Yu Jie Senior Research Fellow on China The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham HousePresident Donald Trump’s signature transactional approach to U.S. leadership in international affairs could work in China’s favor geopolitically. For Beijing, strengthening its engagement with the Global South through its flagship BRI and Global Development Initiative is the way forward to further expand its global standing in contrast to an isolationist United States. Yet, China’s current economic slowdown will limit its diplomatic and financial resources, undermining its ability to maintain the same level of spending on overseas infrastructure development assistance as in the past. Instead, Beijing will focus even more on China’s near neighbors to complete the already established gigantic infrastructure projects that bring both financial and diplomatic returns.Yun Sun Senior Fellow and Co-Director, China, East Asia The Stimson CenterWith the BRI now in its second decade, the previous focus on hard infrastructure has morphed toward the digital economy, the green economy, and “small and beautiful” capacity-building projects aimed at generating growth locally. Given the anticipation of tension with the United States under the second Trump term, China has announced that it will prioritize benefit-sharing with BRI countries to strengthen bilateral trust and ties.