As part of Thursday lectures organized by the Library on Koszykowa and SWPS prof. Mierzejewski presented the Belt and Road initiative from an insider's perspective. He argued that the majority of Beijing's international initiatives are the result of balancing the interests of provincial-level players, and Beijing is concerned with preserving the PRC's unitary status. We come to such conclusions after analyzing the establishment of "economic corridors", such as the Northern Corridor with Russia (Heilongjiang Province) and the Southern Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM EC) which was an initiative of the Yunnan Province authorities. The same happened with the Belt and Road Initiative when the authorities of Chongqing, together with the multinational corporation Hewlett Packard, lobbied Beijing to establish a rail link to Duisburg. The lecture was a result of research conducted in the UMO National Science Center-funded project 2017/25/B/HS5/02117 "The Roles of Local Authorities in China's Foreign Policy" and published in the monograph "China's Provinces and the Belt and Road Initiative," New York, London Routledge 2021.