Societal safety is the result of the coordinated development of several subsystems; the coupling–coordination relationship among economic development (ED), social stability (SS), and ecological environment (EE) is the premise of realizing sustainable societal safety (SSS). Taking Qinghai Province as an example, this paper quantitatively evaluates the development index of each subsystem by constructing ED-SS-EE evaluation index system, then analyzes the spatio-temporal evolution of ED, SS, and EE coupling coordination levels based on the coupling coordination model, and finally predicts the coupling coordination level of ED, SS, and EE by using the GM(1.1) model. The findings are as follows: (1) The economy is developing rapidly, but the regional development is extremely uneven; ED is driving SS, and SS lags behind ED and slowly improves; EE is improving continuously, and the spatial pattern is relatively stable. (2) The ED, SS, and EE systems have a high degree of coupling, showing a fluctuating upward trend. Coordination level is low, showing a slow upward trend, and the regional differences are obvious. (3) In the future, the coordination level of ED, SS, and EE systems in different regions will be upgraded from the level of near imbalance and barely coordination to the level of intermediate coordination, good coordination, and even high-quality coordination. The spatio-temporal description of ED, SS, and EE coupling coordination level not only reveals the development trend and problems of SSS in Qinghai, it also proves the feasibility of evaluating societal safety level based on the coupling coordination level of sustainable social structure system.

With the continuous advancement of the Belt and Road Initiative, countries along the Belt and Road are becoming the most important geo-economic space for China’s peaceful rise. This paper constructs a geo-economic model to measure the geo-economic relations between China and countries along the Belt and Road, analyzes the spatial-temporal patterns of geo-economic flow between China and these countries, and discusses the spatial agglomeration of geo-economic flow between China and these countries. The results show that the geo-economic flow between China and the countries along the Belt and Road is increasing and the geo-economic relations between China and these countries are continuing to improve. Trade flow is far greater than investment flow, and China’s geo-economic relations with these countries have mainly relied on trade flow. The spatial differentiation of geo-economic flow between China and countries along the Belt and Road is significant. The development of geo-economic relations is unbalanced, and regional powers play an important role. The geo-economic center of gravity of China and countries along the Belt and Road was moving in the northeastern part of India and it first moved to the northwest and then to the southeast. China’s geo-economic space has obvious core-peripheral structure characteristics, and Southeast Asia is the core area of China’s geo-economic space. China’s geo-economic space presents a northwest-southeast pattern in the direction. There has been a significant, positive spatial autocorrelation in geo-economic flow between China and the countries along the Belt and Road, but the overall spatial agglomeration has been weak. The geo-economic flow agglomerations of China and these countries have mainly occurred in Southeast Asia, and the main agglomeration type has been high–high. The geo-economic activities of China and Southeast Asia had certain spatial spillover effects. To promote the sustainable development of China’s geo-economic relations with the countries along the Belt and Road, China should upgrade investment networks with these countries, optimize geo-economic relations with regional powers, and promote the full development of trade flow, investment flow and other geo-economic element flow.

With the advances of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the geo-economic interactions between China and countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road counties (MSRCs) continue to increase, and analyzing the geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs is extremely important for a scientific understanding of bilateral geo-economic cooperation. Differently from the traditional logic of geo-economic competition and cooperation, we constructed a new framework based on the dominant factors of geo-economic relations and used an extreme random forest regression model to classify the geo-economic relation types between China and MSRCs from 2006 to 2017. The results show that the unbalanced development of investment and trade between China and MSRCs hindered the enhancement of the intensity of bilateral geo-economic linkage from 2006 to 2017. The “Matthew effect” of China’s geo-economic flow linkage with MSRCs is significant. There are obvious differences in the dominant factors affecting the types of geo-economic relations between China and MSRCs, and the distribution of the importance of the indices of the types of geo-economic relations in each country is disordered. Geopolitics, markets, and resources have played important roles in the geo-economic linkages between China and MSRCs. There are five types of geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs: market-oriented type, resource-oriented type, market-resource-oriented type, market-geopolitics-oriented type, and resource-geopolitics-oriented type, of which the market-oriented type is the most important type of geo-economic relations. In the future, China should focus on regional powers along the Maritime Silk Road for bilateral geo-economic cooperation, actively promote the balanced development of bilateral geo-economic elements flows, strengthen geopolitical cooperation with MSRCs, and formulate cooperation plans according to the types of geo-economic relations.