China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is expected to be the largest infrastructure development scheme of the twenty-first century. There is escalating concern over BRI’s potential environmental impacts in Southeast Asia, a global biodiversity hotspot and a focus area of BRI development. Case studies of Indonesia, Myanmar, Lao PDR and Malaysia show that the success of BRI in bringing about sustainable growth and opportunities depends on the Chinese government and financiers, as well as the agencies and governments involved when BRI investments take place. The adoption of best environmental practices is critical in ensuring that growth is sustainable and that bad environmental practices are not locked in for decades to come.

This paper demonstrates that increasing national identification negatively impacts citizens preference for overthrowing the regime. We propose a sequential game with a representative rich agent who decides on the level of taxation, and a representative poor agent who then decides whether to launch a revolt against the rich or accept the proposed tax rate. While the utility of the rich is income, the utility of the poor citizen is the sum of each the poor's income and the utility derived from national identification. Logit and OLS analysis on data from the World Value Survey potentially supports the main finding, as empirics show that national pride is negatively correlated with the stated preference of respondents for radically changing the government, and the tax rate to avert a revolt decreases with increasing national pride.