Confucian geopolitics or Chinese geopolitics?

Abstract

There has been a wave of discourses about Chinese geopolitics along with the quick rise of China, particularly with the Belt and Road Initiative and recent rivalry between the US and China. An et al.’s (2021) ‘Towards a Confucian Geopolitics’ opens a new door to such discourses. While welcoming the notion of hybrid Confucian geopolitics proposed by their article, this commentary raises several critical questions. These questions concern whether everything about China should be interpreted through geopolitical reasoning, whether Confucianism is fundamental and deterministic in contemporary Chinese culture, what is really special to new Chinese geopolitics if anything, and whether China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be understood as a cultural project. Answers to these questions may help to consolidate a new Chinese geopolitics.

Locating the Belt and Road Initiative's spatial trilectics

“…The need to work across scales is hardly new. However, in light of the proliferating calls to move from analyzing the BRI as a discursive field of knowledge towards understanding it as a materially grounded field of practice (Lindberg & Biddulph, 2021; Liu, 2021; Oakes, 2021), it is worth reiterating the importance of linking place and scale, namely adopting a place‐based methodology that will remain committed to connecting multiple scales of analysis.…”