China's Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia and the Middle East

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims at connecting the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa through a combination of infrastructure projects and soft‐power programs. All of the six land bridges and maritime routes under the BRI extend westward, mostly passing through Central Asia and the Middle East on land or by sea. Cooperation with countries in these regions will, according to China's design, meet its domestic energy needs, and grow the country's economy. China recognizes, however, that in Central Asia and the Middle East, the risks posed by what it calls the “Three Evils” — terrorism, extremism, and separatism can impact the success of the BRI. They can also impact stability in its own adjacent areas, including Xinjiang. Therefore, in concert with the BRI, China is also identifying and deploying bilateral and multilateral diplomatic mechanisms aimed at security coordination with BRI countries in these two volatile regions. This article provides an overview of BRI developments in the two regions and examines some of the diplomatic mechanisms China is using to coordinate security and reduce risks.     

Crossing Khorgos: Soft power,security, and suspect loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh boundary

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects deepen connections across Eurasia, the Sino-Kazakh border has been rematerialized in a manner that complicates the exercise of Chinese BRI soft power. On the one hand, the border city of Khorgos is being rebuilt as a bridgehead to facilitate trade and development between the countries; new infrastructure and spectacle at Khorgos and beyond works to entice Kazakhs to cross the border in pursuit of economic opportunities. At the same time, recent crackdowns on Muslims in China's Xinjiang Province has led to the detention and harassment of cross-border migrants with differentiated migrant statuses. Chinese security forces' continued anxieties about separatism in its borderlands imperil the developmental horizons the BRI project uses to entice Kazakhs. It also threatens the translocal development that a border conductive to mobility has provided for Kazakhs over the past thirty years. I argue that the BRI in northwest China fuses soft power rhetoric with territorial security practices in a way that is proving to be counter-productive. This is because border hardening can reactivate borders as “difference condensers” that draw from imperial and national legacies to reinscribe the othering of spaces and peoples beyond the border.     

Converging anticipatory geographies in Oceania: The Belt and Road Initiative and Look North in Fiji

Anticipatory geographies are state-driven initiatives promoting economic hope through the language of rejuvenation, prosperity and connectivity. As a discursive process, anticipatory geographies reconfigure spaces and identities. These narratives have proliferated in an age of intensified connectivity as states aim to imprint their political and economic visions. Oceania has become a site of multiple anticipatory geographies external and internal to the region with the presence of China as an enabling factor. In 2006, Fiji reintroduced a Look North policy to globalize economic connectivity placing Fijian agency at the centre, and in 2015, Beijing included Oceania into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. This work examines the processes when two anticipatory geographies meet. Adapting critical geopolitics, the research presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of Chinese and Fijian texts referencing Look North and BRI. The work reveals the entanglement of anticipatory geographies in Fiji has generated a co-produced discourse of prosperity displaying continuity from Look North to the BRI. Although there is a shift toward defining the Sino-Fijian relationship through BRI, it does not signal an overwrite of an indigenous policy framework. I argue Look North has been ‘re-placed’ into the BRI to co-produce a narrative that permits the ongoing articulation of Fijian interests. With the Belt and Road becoming the defining framework for China's relations with countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, this work suggests Fiji's handling of BRI's impact on its domestic spaces and policies is an indicator of how other states will reposition their promises of economic hope to civil society.     

“Silk Road here we come”: Infrastructural myths,post-disaster politics,and the shifting urban geographies of Nepal

In this paper, we explain how China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) drives urban transformation in Nepal reconfiguring geopolitical and geoeconomic relations and remaking the sociopolitical, cultural and material fabric of hitherto peripheral spaces. Given that BRI infrastructures materialize in parallel with Chinese-funded reconstruction projects, we pay attention to the role of post-disaster politics to unravel how ongoing urban transformation does not only affect the present and the future but also people's histories and post-disaster memories by treating places of (re)building as empty of previous life and history. By drawing on 16 months of fieldwork, we show that despite the evident role of the BRI as an agent of urban transformation, the materialization of most BRI projects depends on geopolitical rivalries, negotiations, unstable local coalitions and escalating social contestation. We conclude that in the post-disaster era, BRI projects have become new vehicles towards Naya [new] Nepal, along with many other infrastructural myths that preceded the country's modern history. Nonetheless, the Naya urban Nepal that is emerging from the ruins of the past is contested and uncertain, a far cry from the days of the Panchayat regime and the civil war, when such gargantuan projects were rarely challenged by Nepali people. This is the unique trajectory of Silk Road urbanization in Nepal: an ultimate path to reach a long due rural-to-urban transition that is inextricably linked with decades of infrastructural violence and precarity and strongly shaped by people's struggles against the unequal geographies of BRI-driven urban transformation.     

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.     

‘Aerial Silk Roads’: Airport Infrastructures in China's Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is widely touted as China's answer to development through international connectivity. The scheme has often been linked to China's objectives of crafting a new world order centred on itself and/or stabilizing its economy through externalizing surplus capacity. While important in broadly framing China's relationship with the world, this article posits that such a fixation on state-centric visions of development leaves the door open for misinterpretation, mistaking the BRI for a coherent set of projects imposed ‘from above’. Delving into the execution of infrastructure planning on the ground, this article argues that taking a practice-oriented approach to large-scale developmental schemes can more accurately shed light on their internally fractured processes. Two airport projects in central China branded as part of the country's ‘aerial Silk Roads’ are examined to illustrate these dynamics, with particular attention paid to the airports’ shifting conceptualizations, the competitive motivations behind their (re)construction, and the social relations sustaining them. The authors argue that closely tracking the unfolding of a range of infrastructure planning practices within specific projects can demystify modern-day developmental programmes like the BRI, by revealing how their ‘grand’ visions are often reinterpreted, altered and frustrated at local levels, even before they have a chance to influence the world.     

Disciplinary geopolitics and the rise of international development studies in China

There has been a growing political and scholarly interest in the re-emergence of Chinese development cooperation and this work explores the construction of South-South spatial matrix of knowledge, power and imagination. The paper examines the critical geopolitics of producing international development studies in China as an intellectual project over the last 5–10 years, in close relation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on eight months' fieldwork in Beijing, it develops a political economic geography of individuals, institutions and ideologies that have shaped the geographically and politically situated processes of inventing Chinese international development studies. The paper traces the spatial genealogy of the disciplinary regime, making visible the rise of a division of social scientific labour at a complicated moment of geopolitical flux, especially against the backdrop of intensifying US-China rivalry. It also maps out the tensions and nuances in an uneven field of knowledge and power. The future of the nascent state-disciplinary apparatus is uncertain, not least dependent on China's ongoing reinterpretation of its national identity and national mission.     

Economic statecraft in China's new overseas special economic zones: soft power,business or resource security?

China's rapidly growing economic engagement with other developing countries has aroused intense debates, but these debates have often generated more heat than light. The Chinese government is clearly pushing its companies to move offshore in greater numbers, and state‐owned firms figure prominently in many of the major investments abroad. Yet relatively little research exists on when, how and why the Chinese government intervenes in the overseas economic activities of its firms. China's state‐sponsored economic diplomacy in other developing countries could play three major strategic roles: strengthening resource security, enhancing political relationships and soft power, and boosting commercial opportunities for national firms. This article examines China's programme to establish overseas special economic zones as one tool of Beijing's economic statecraft. It traces the process by which they were established and implemented, and investigates the characteristics of the 19 zones initially selected in a competitive tender process. The article concludes that even in countries rich in natural resources, the overseas zones were overwhelmingly positioned as commercial projects. Particularly in the Asian zones, China is following in the footsteps of Japan. The zone programme, and the Chinese foreign investment it hoped to foster, represents a clear case of the international projection of China's developmental state. However, in Africa (but not generally elsewhere) discourse surrounding the zones publicly positions them as a transfer of China's own development success, thus potentially enhancing China's political relationships and soft power on the continent.     

Coupling national geo-political economic strategies and the Belt and Road Initiative: The China-Belarus Great Stone Industrial Park

The joint development by Belarus and China of the Great Stone Industrial Park (GSIP) is designed to establish a high-tech industrial zone and an eco-friendly satellite city of Minsk as a key node on the Eurasian Land Bridge linking China with the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. The development and organization of the GSIP are explained in the light of a coupling of the strategic goals of the two countries in the context of a new Chinese model of external engagement called an emergent geo-political economic culture. These goals include Belarus' desire to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and oil, upgrade and diversify its economy, strengthen its integration with Eurasia and find new partners, by attracting Chinese and other foreign direct investment in the context of China's Going Out and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An analysis of the roles of national leaders Aliaksandr Lukashenka and Xi Jinping and of different stakeholders in the predominantly top-down design, development and governance of the park reveals the way in which a BRI cooperation platform permits the coupling of Chinese and Belarusian interests and strategies in ways through which each side expects to benefit.     

Concrete and coal: China's infrastructural assemblages in the Balkans

This article analyzes Chinese-financed infrastructural projects in the Balkans to further our thinking about how infrastructures shape international politics. By adopting an assemblage approach, which views infrastructures as part of a complex and dynamic interaction of both human and non-human actors and capacities, it questions the vascular trope that sees infrastructures as arteries of influence and power. Building on research into the construction of roads and coal power plants, assemblage analysis provides the nuance that refutes simplistic accounts of China's grand strategy in its Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese actors are not geostrategic players exerting influence from afar, but have become thoroughly linked to the region's politics through their specific modes of entry. The business priorities of Chinese state-owned enterprises required formal disentanglements, yet the political arrangements underpinning such deals have ironically caused Chinese actors to become entangled in the Balkans through its political instability, developmental discourses, fiscal exigencies, the traces of previous infrastructures on its society and ecology, and the often overlooked anchoring role of materials such as concrete or coal.     

海外华商参与“一带一路”建设问卷调查研究

论文采用问卷调查方法,以董事长和总经理级别的华商作为主要调查对象,总结分析华商参与“一带一路”的态度、动机、需求及困难和风险。调查发现:第一,“一带一路”倡议得到了绝大多数华商的积极支持和热情响应。华商对“一带一路”倡议总体认识到位,但部分华商对“一带一路”性质认知存有偏差。第二,华商参与“一带一路”的主要动机是民族情感需求和经济利益驱动,两者得到满足或平衡时,参与动力最强,积极性最高。第三,华商参与“一带一路”普遍存在渠道不畅、项目对接难、融资难度大、跨境资金流动难、汇率波动大等实际困难。第四,华商在参与“一带一路”中主要面临政治、经济和法律三大风险。建议引导华商参与“一带一路”,要充分考虑华商的特殊性,注重情利等值原则,让华商在参与“一带一路”建设中情利双收,实现共赢。     

Not-so-new silk roads: Japan's foreign policies on Asian connectivity infrastructure under the radar

Scholarly narratives concerning China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) tend to contextualise this project within China's rivalry with the United States and Japan. Such interpretations often reduce and misconstrue Japan's initiatives in Asian infrastructure finance as mere reactivity to China's advances. This paper will showcase Japan's own foreign and financial policies regarding infrastructure in Asia and the New Silk Road regions since the end of the Cold War. I argue that Japan's presence in that field is underappreciated and under-researched, as Japan's infrastructural footprint in the New Silk Road significantly pre-dates the BRI. Furthermore, I stress the fact that Japan's foreign policy in Asian infrastructure finance featured important cooperative postures toward China, especially within multilateral development banks. The paper makes a contribution to emerging scholarship on the BRI—often reliant on strategic communications and projections—by highlighting Japan's role in regional infrastructure to show how our understanding of international relations and international political economy in Asia can be better informed by economic history and area studies.     

非政府组织如何影响中国在柬埔寨投资项目？——基于地缘社会的解析

随着中国对外交流的日益频繁和“一带一路”倡议对“民心相通”的强调,针对地缘社会中各种行为体的研究需求愈发迫切。柬埔寨被认为是“一带一路”国际合作的新样板,但中国在此的项目也并非一帆风顺,地缘社会因素在其中发挥着重要作用,而非政府组织是当地地缘社会中的一个关键行为体和核心要素。因此,本文以柬埔寨的非政府组织为例,基于实地调研获取的观察和访谈以及二手文献资料和数据,考察中国在柬埔寨的柴阿润水电站项目中当地非政府组织的影响及其得以形成的机制因素。解析地缘社会环境可以帮助识别中国行为体在“走出去”过程中可能面临的社会风险因素,推动海外项目在当地社会顺利落地和融入。     

China and the United States in Africa: Coming conflict or commercial coexistence?

China and the US are two key players in the recent round of ‘scrambling’ for Africa. They compete for control over oil and other strategic resources, for markets, and for political influence. Their competition has alarmed many. This study tests the alarmist interpretations by identifying what the US and China are actually doing and to how they perceive each other's activities. Their ambitions are often considered in isolation. When laid out side by side, the extent to which their activities in Africa may overlap or clash can be seen more clearly. China and the US are seeking different things at different places in the continent and are careful not to upset one another. Their activities do not support the dire prediction. The ‘scramble for Africa’ may irritate; it is unlikely to cause direct confrontations because competition remains by and large economic and economic competition in an integrated global economy creates networks of constraints that ameliorate potential confrontation.     

China's Economic and Political Penetration in Africa

A senior American specialist on China and noted geographer presents a study of that country's economic and political penetration into the African continent. The author identifies three key elements of China's objectives and plan, namely (1) support for Chinese policies in international affairs, particularly with regard to Taiwan, (2) search for oil and other mineral resources, and (3) creation of a new market for Chinese goods and services in tandem with additional jobs in China. The paper includes four case studies highlighting economic activities stimulated by Chinese loans and investments in the Republic of South Africa, Egypt, Sudan, and Angola. Considerable attention is devoted to oil imports, exports of cheap consumer goods, and construction and repair of infrastructure by Chinese technicians and laborers, as well as the competition between Chinese imports and host-country manufacturing and the PRC's diplomatic support of rogue African nations. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F020, F210, F350, F540. 11 figures, 1 table, 47 references.     

Trans-Himalayan power corridors: Infrastructural politics and China's Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal

This article examines the shifting dimensions of Chinese infrastructural aid in Nepal, focusing on the politics of anticipation and enunciation that shape Nepali perceptions of Chinese-facilitated development and negotiations concerning Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing from ethnographic research focused on sites of ongoing and planned infrastructure development in Nepal's two northern districts of Rasuwa and Gorkha, we analyze the uncertain remaking of these areas into trans-Himalayan power corridors. Our examination reveals the gamut of transitions, opportunities, reorientations, and expectations that the BRI and other forms of Chinese investment evoke in Nepal, showing how politics articulate infrastructures, and vice versa. After reviewing the historical context of Nepal-China relations, our empirical analysis begins in late 2014 when China became the single largest source of foreign direct investment in Nepal, continues through several rounds of negotiations about the BRI and other forms of Chinese infrastructural investment and aid, and concludes with a review of significant Nepal-China agreements at the Second Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing in April 2019. Tacking between remote construction sites, scenes of diplomatic debate, borderland villages, investment summits, and speculative media coverage, we demonstrate how the Belt and Road Initiative is differently enacted and co-constructed by a variety of Nepali and Chinese actors who interpret, reimagine, and rhetorically appropriate the BRI within their own narrations of future possibility.     

Improvised Hybridity in the “Fixing” of Chinese Infrastructure Capital: The Case of Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway

The article explores the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio-political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.     

Women's collective economic strategies and political transformation in rural South Africa

This article examines the economic processes and socio‐political institutions that shape women's involvement in community projects. Feminist materialism and postcolonial theory provide the framework to analyze these livelihood strategies as they are grounded in the material conditions of women's lives. The empirical study is based in a rural northern province of South Africa where colonialism and apartheid have contributed to extreme economic and social hardships. Fieldwork was conducted in Limpopo to analyze how community projects contribute to livelihood strategies. In an area where migrant remittances remain one of the main sources of income for rural households, women have increasingly engaged in collective economic strategies such as pottery making, sewing, and agricultural production. These strategies are embedded in a complex set of patriarchal institutions that reinforce unequal access to resources and have historically marginalized rural black women. Despite these barriers, findings from this study demonstrate that community projects provide the potential for economic and social empowerment, especially among rural women.     

Internationalisation of the Chinese subnational state and capital: the case of Yunnan and the Greater Mekong Subregion

This article examines the participation of China's Yunnan Province in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) in order to understand the dynamics behind the regionalisation and internationalisation strategies adopted by a Chinese subnational state. It argues that the Yunnan case demonstrates the outflow of state capital—both national and provincially based—to have been instrumental in harnessing Beijing's and Kunming's political support for programs of subregional economic cooperation. This political support has led to a state capital alliance underpinning the economic expansion of provincial state capital into the GMS. It also argues that subregional governance arrangements, such as those featuring in the GMS, embed the competitive advantage of state capital through new forms of extra-territorial governance that ostensibly de-emphasises the political dimensions of state capital. The internationalisation of Yunnan subnational state is reflected in its political strategy of subregional governance. These changes point to complex rescaling of not just national state but also subnational states in Asia that find expression in variegated regional and subregional political projects.     

Democracy and environment: congruencies and contradictions in southern Africa

Using case studies from Malawi, South Africa, and Mozambique, this paper suggests that there is no necessary relationship between democracy and the environment. In Africa, democratization since the late 1980s has been the source of increased optimism about the environment, particularly as ideas of `participatory' resource management have replaced older top-down conservation models. However, this optimism may be premature. Commonly identified linkages between democracy and environment include increased accountability, development, and participation. In many African countries, however, `democracy' is an empty shell, lacking the political institutions, civil society, and economic and cultural conditions necessary to achieve real democratic competition and accountability. Moreover, the paper illustrates from the case studies that even where the goals of democracy are realized, these can have negative as well as positive environmental consequences. Hence, faith in `democracy'—wherever and in whatever form—to solve Africa's environmental problems may be misplaced. The question that needs to be asked is not whether democracy is good for the environment, but how and when it can be made to work to meet social and environmental objectives. There is room for hope: democratization in Africa has provided a more open arena for political discourse, in which questions can be asked about the specific kinds of political, social, and economic reforms and social institutions that will be needed to make `participatory' community-based resource management successful. The optimistic discourse about democracy and environment in Africa tends to obscure these difficult questions, putting at risk the true promise of democratization.