By using the panel data of China’s OFDI between 2006 and 2015 of 38 countries along “Belt and Road”, this paper systematically investigates the impact of the host country’s institutional characteristics and economic environments on China’s OFDI, and its corresponding “proximity effect” between the host country and “the third country” based on spatial Durbin model. The total sample results show that China’s OFDI presents a significant preference for resource endowment in the host country market, with an obvious pursuit of potential market and low labor cost. It also prefers lower political and higher economic institutional environments. The proximity effect of total sample presents itself as a spillover effect. The regression results of 15 countries in the central and western Asia concord with empirical results of the total sample. However, the subsample results of 10 European countries show that China’s OFDI has no significant correlation to the political and economic institutional environment of these host countries. The proximity effect here presents itself as crowding out effect, which is influenced by wages in neighboring countries, market scale and bilateral trade volume with China.