key: cord-0057290-uprt2o0y authors: Langendonk, Steven title: Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin and Jinghan Zeng, eds., One Belt, One Road, One Story? Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative: (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), XI + 282p. $119.99 hardback; $89.00 eBook date: 2021-03-10 journal: J Chin Polit Sci DOI: 10.1007/s11366-021-09732-9 sha: 417a88347d87a243cd725bf302e7a499bbde1766 doc_id: 57290 cord_uid: uprt2o0y nan a positive-sum BRI narrative" (p. 70-71), painting in broad essayistic strokes which often fail to discriminate between explanation and prescription. While generally sympathetic to book's project, the chapters of the analytical section complicate the delivery of its main argument at an empirical and methodological level. The contributions by Ma, Li, and Feng and Huang each evince a different dimension of a cognitive chasm which separates (elite) interpretation of the relationship and the BRI in Europe and China. Feng and Huang, both affiliated with CICIR, provide a rare account of how Chinese elites' understanding of the EU has evolved since the financial crisis. By showing how the narratives of 'saving Europe from financial disaster' and the BRI were largely ignored in the EU, it points to a dynamic of structurally informed misrecognition which also features prominently in my own fieldwork. Ma likewise posits that the relationship is hindered by the inability of the respective sides to cognitively remove themselves from their "own institution and historical experiences" (p. 111). Finally, Li's analysis of German, British and French media points to deep-seated and stable anxieties about China's growing role in European affairs (see also [3] ). The friction between the two sections at the empirical level draws out the problematic tendency to apply SNT at the level of state or policy rhetoric, and avoid comparatively messy but equally relevant sites of narrative reception [5] . Given the prescriptive aim of the book, doubt is cast on SNT's utility for generating practicable and ethically sound policy advice. Despite not featuring prominently in the book's main argument, the remaining contributions by Keuleers and Van Noort illustrate the continued promise of SNT as a conceptual site for inter-methodological dialogue [4] . Van Noort should be commended for bringing SNT into dialogue with Steele's reading of ontological security, and the development of a visual analysis of BRI communication. Keuleers' Q methodology-assisted analysis of how South African students interpret Chinese and EU narratives and weave constitutive components into individually differentiated bricolages raises the bar for studies on narrative reception. Considering the editors' own admission that theoretical and methodological obstacles remain for using SNT to "illuminate the substance of EU-China relations" (p. 9), it may be prudent to ground its prescriptive potentiality in the creativity it elicits. The volume is likely to be of interest to scholars exploring approaches to SNT and may thus stimulate a broader discussion on how it may illuminate, from above as well as below, key relationships in global politics. The EU's bilateral relations with China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) blues: Powering BRI research back on track to avoid choppy seas Discourse power as a means to 'Struggle for position': A critical case study of the belt and road narrative's effects on foreign policy formulation in the Netherlands Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power The unsaid and unseen: on hearing silences and seeing invisibilities in strategic narratives Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.