Reordering China, Respacing the World: Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路) as an Emergent Geopolitical Culture

Banking ‘development’: the geopolitical–economy of infrastructure financing

“…For Liu and Dunford (2016), the BRI is more than Chinese industrial redeployment and outward investment: it is an inclusive model of globalization. This inclusive model is rooted in Chinese civilizational and moral values and discourses emphasizing political non-interference, mutual respect and mutually beneficial relationships with the periphery, comprising a 'geopolitical culture' of the BRI (Dunford, 2020;Lin et al, 2019). Importantly there have also been critiques (and counter-critiques) levied against the BRI's ulterior motives, including its 'debt-trap diplomacy' and the use of Chinese labour for project construction (Brautigam, 2020;Lai et al, 2020).…”

Below the Belt? Territory and Development in China's International Rise

“…More recently those studying infrastructure have focused on the ways in which infrastructure plays into state‐building processes (Harvey and Knox, 2012). Here, infrastructure can be a means of spreading the state's reach across its territory in highly visible ways — such as roads — or of connecting contiguous territories into new territorial forms; indeed, the BRI is an ‘imagined’ territory that is being brought into being through the construction of transport infrastructure (Grant, 2018; Lin et al., 2019). In these accounts state power is very much central to infrastructure systems.…”

“…The BRI is the flagship of China's internationalization push and can, at one level, be seen as a ‘grand strategy’ which is part of the country's wider global aspirations (Narins and Agnew, 2019). Authors have pointed to the twin movements that tie Chinese nation building, territory and development together (Grant, 2018; Lin et al., 2019; Yeh and Wharton, 2016). One is a national project to integrate the country, particularly connecting and developing the western regions which were de‐prioritized in the reform period when investment was targeted at the eastern coastal regions.…”

“…Jones and Zeng (2019) usefully argue that in practice the BRI is a loose policy ‘envelope’ whose ‘fuzziness’ is its strength. Spatially, this fuzziness is captured in the purposive failure to develop an official map of the BRI (Lin et al., 2019) which gives policy makers the leeway to adapt the so‐called strategy as macroeconomic, geopolitical and local conditions change. In Sassen's (2018) framing, territory is created across national borders but is not formalized beyond these loose policy proclamations and high‐level summits.…”

Closer to home: Enabling the Dragon's global outreach through engaging interests in Asia

“…In a book that seeks to improve our understanding of China's relationship with its immediate southern regional neighbour, getting the provincial details are critical considering most grounded interactions are at the subnational scale. Nanning and the rest of Guangxi province have seen active, if not strong, soft and hard power influences projected from its area on Southeast Asia with its direct land border with Vietnam (1979 Sino‐Vietnamese War) and its strategic Beibu Gulf (Gulf of Tonkin) that now serves as a key point of the Southern Transport Corridor linking western China with major ports such as Singapore in Southeast Asia (Lin et al ., ).…”