Impacts of COVID-19 on BRI: A Case Study of Thailand

Panthamit, Nisit

The epidemic disease COVID-19 presents great health challenges in the social, political and economic sector across regional states. This chapter investigates the implications of COVID-19 on the policy and governance, and public perception and risk scenarios that have resulted from the engagement, relations, and participation between China and Thailand. Framed by China’s BRI infrastructure connectivity, frontier states have growing exposure and entanglement with China through roads, railways, ports, flows of people, goods, and resources. These affairs are now threatened by the Coronavirus representations and resistance at the national levels. Our investigation of the economic, social, and related context of COVID-19 builds on the urgent contextual knowledge through fact from a situation that occurred in Thailand as well as related views and comments from policymakers, and private and public gathering from literatures, social media evaluation, and TV/print discourse analysis since the transformations caused by the pandemic.