Geopolitical gravity and blanks on the BRI map; or why what is missing really matters
Author: Galen Murton (James Madison University)
When thinking about the “downstream effects of the BRI,” Nepal comes quickly to mind. As both a hydrological basin of great rivers descending from Himalayan massifs and the Tibetan Plateau and a site of widespread infrastructure development significantly financed by Beijing, much moves from China into Nepal. Flows of water and synthetic garments; capital investment and political alliances – Chinese stuff is increasingly ubiquitous throughout Nepal. In no uncertain terms, the Belt and Road has accelerated the movement of these things – commodities and ideologies, energy and power. However, it is not the BRI as physical infrastructure that gets things done in Nepal; rather, like so many places elsewhere, the BRI instead functions as an instrument with discursive force, an imaginary that underwrites promises of modernity and motivates particular political activity. (more…)
July 20, 2021
Excavating BRI Futures
Author: Evelina Gambino (University College London)
Spanning over 140 countries, the Belt and Road Initiative has a global scope. As a vision of development that centers on the proliferation of logistical corridors, it foresees a worldly technoscape whereby seamless flows of commodities, capital, people and data constitute the central resource for the sustenance of future lifeworlds. Yet, alongside these borderless horizons of things in motion, the BRI has also become the repository of other ways of acting on the future and negotiating infrastructural pasts. (more…)
June 21, 2021
The coverage of BRI and Sino-Russian “integration of integrations” in Russian newspapers
Author: Anna Kuteleva (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
“Win-win” (合作共赢) is still a veritable guiding mantra in China’s foreign affairs, yet a China that was “hiding capabilities and keeping a low profile” (韬光养晦) has been replaced with a China that can and wants to “strive for achievement” (奋发有为) in international politics. As a case in point, the discursive construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in its entirety presupposes establishing closer sociocultural and political ties on its route, as well as noteworthy changes in the geopolitical scenery. (more…)
May 24, 2021
Downstream is Actually Downstream: BRI, Hydropower, and Chinese Imperialism in Southeast Asia
Author: Stevan Harrell (University of Washington)
After the 1952 revolution that brought him to power, Gamal Abdel Nasser obtained British and American financing for the Aswan High Dam, which would provide electricity and water to Egyptian farmers, but would stop the Nile floods that had fertilized the rich farmlands since before the days of the Pharaohs. When the US and UK withdrew their financing for geopolitical reasons, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal (a project of British Imperialism), and Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt and captured the canal. They gave it back, but Nasser then proceeded to obtain Soviet financing for the dam, which was completed in 1970. (more…)
May 4, 2021
“Belt and Road” and the globalisation of Chinese migration
Author: Pál Nyiri (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
“Belt and Road” is perceived mainly as a geopolitical project that manifests itself principally in infrastructure and capital flows. To the extent that human flows associated with it attract attention, they are typically seen as instruments of a “state-mobilised globalisation” (Ye 2020) who may benefit from it by escaping unemployment at home while taking away potential jobs from locals. An influential if somewhat extreme instance of such a view is Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araujo’s book China’s Silent Army. In some cases, this picture is roughly accurate. For instance, Miriam Driessen’s fine-grained ethnography of Chinese construction workers in Ethiopia interprets their migration as a way to deal with pressures at home, which entails little meaningful engagement with their local environment. (For a critical attempt to highlight the diversity of Chinese labour abroad, see Made in China Journal 2021.) (more…)
April 12, 2021
Infrastructure as a Planetary Sculpture: The Future of the Belt and Road Initiative in the Anthropocene
Author: Hai Ren (University of Arizona and Sichuan Fine Arts Institute)
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a planetary set of future-oriented projects. Announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013 during visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia in 2013, it calls for the development of a “Silk Road Economic Belt” (丝绸之路经济带) and a “Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road” (21世纪海上丝绸之路), which together comprise the “Belt and Road” (一带一路) Initiative. At the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing in 2017, President Xi highlighted the BRI’s “Silk Road Spirit” as a vision of infrastructural development[1] that would bring prosperity to relatively poor countries across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America. (more…)
March 18, 2021
Beyond Governance: Understanding Corruption Opportunities and Networks in China’s BRI Projects in Central Asia
Author: Alexander Cooley (Columbia University)
One of the emerging memes of China’s Belt and Road Initiative’s possible impact is a concern about the potential to fuel corruption in partnering countries. Often phrased as “governance problems,” critics speculate that substantial investments in large-scale infrastructure projects– such as road-building, railways, pipelines and power generation plants- may flood BRI partner countries with loans and investments that they are unable to absorb and might fuel local bribe-taking and graft. (more…)
February 12, 2021
The BRI as an Exercise in Infrastructural Thinking
Author: Tim Oakes (University of Colorado Boulder)
It’s difficult to understand how a project with a name like “One Belt, One Road” (一带一路) could spark much excitement. And while the translation upgrade “Belt & Road Initiative” suggests something a little less haphazard – something with goals and frameworks and plans – the name still fails to stimulate the degree of reverie and unabashed obsession that China’s “project of the century” has in fact garnered. (more…)
January 19, 2021
Introducing Transformations: Downstream Effects of the BRI
Authors: Ed Schatz (University of Toronto) and Rachel Silvey (University of Toronto)
Welcome to our blog! Transformations: Downstream Effects of the BRI is a platform for discussing the complex changes set in motion in Asia and Eurasia by China’s enormous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Ours is not an effort to chase the headlines. Instead, we seek to bring together scholars whose research considers how the BRI is reconfiguring social, cultural, and political forces across Asia and Eurasia in sometimes expected and sometimes surprising ways.
December 10, 2020