The paradox of competing connectivity strategies in Asia

Abstract

Competing connectivity strategies are a core component of geopolitics in the twenty-first century – from China’s Belt and Road Initiative to Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy. To demonstrate the multifaceted consequences of the new multiplicity of connectivity strategies, we propose a conceptual distinction between two forms of competition among connectivity projects: the commonly addressed horizontal competition between central state-driven connectivity strategies and the less explored vertical competition between existing or potential connectivity schemes below and above the level of the nation state. We contend that although typically targeting differing forms of connectivity, strategies across levels of governance are not necessarily complementary. To the contrary, the geopolitical nature of relatively new and nation-state-driven strategies can also severely undermine sustainable intra-state connectivity. By way of illustration, we examine competing connectivity investments in the Bay of Bengal, a subregion of South Asia between the two Asian rivals India and China. Driven at least partly by horizontal competition, centrally devised and executed connectivity strategies oftentimes crowd out pre-existing connectivity based on subnational initiatives or transnational societal linkages. To fully assess contemporary connectivity investments in Asia, future scholarship should take account of the challenges and complications along both dimensions of competing connectivity strategies.

Keywords:

• Connectivity
• China
• India
• Belt and Road Initiative
• BCIM
• multipolarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sinan Chu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9518-1953

Notes

1 Wroughton and Brunnstrom, “Wary of China’s Rise.”

2 European Union External Action Service, “Connecting Europe and Asia.”

3 Li, “Belt and Road Initiative,” 169–87; Schulze and Blechinger-Talcott, “Introduction: Dimensions of Sino–Japanese Rivalry,” 726.

4 Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization.

5 Kavalski, “Unexpected Consequences of China’s Cooperation,” 1–19; Junxian and Yan, “China’s New Silk Road,” 105–30.

6 See, for instance, Paul, “When Balance of Power Meets Globalization,” 50–63.

7 We understand a connectivity strategy as a foreign policy proposal or set of foreign policy proposals, which assign infrastructure investments in the widest sense a key role in furthering a country’s wider foreign and/or domestic policy goals. Examples include the BRI as well as Act East, the Free and Open Indo-Pacific and the EU’s connectivity strategy for Asia.

8 Tellmann, Opitz, and Kolb, “Operations of the Global.”

9 Ibid., 212.

10 Ibid.

11 Kolb, “Exploring the Metaphor of Connectivity.”

12 Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 5–7.

13 Tellmann, Opitz and Staehli, “Operations of the Global,” 212.

14 Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 6.

15 Kolb, “Exploring the Metaphor of Connectivity.”

16 Also see Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 18; and Lobo-Guerrero and Kuntz, “Connectivity as Problem.”

17 Xavier, “Sambandh as Strategy.”

18 Fünfgeld, “Dream of ASEAN Connectivity,” 287–311.

19 Asian Development Bank, Meeting Asia’s Infrastructure Needs, vii.

20 Fünfgeld, “Dream of ASEAN Connectivity,” 299.

21 European Union External Action Service, “Connecting Europe and Asia,” 3.

22 Despite the fact that Bhutan opted out of the agreement.

23 Benabdallah, “Contesting the International Order by Integrating It,” 92–108.

24 Plagemann, “Small States and Competing Connectivity Strategies.”

25 Freeman, “China’s ‘Regionalism Foreign Policy,’” 81–97.

26 Rüland, “Old Wine in New Bottles?”

27 Kolb, “Exploring the Metaphor of Connectivity,” 140.

28 Ironically, this is precisely what is now being challenged by a ‘new buzzword’: decoupling. See, for instance, Rachman, “Worlds Apart.”

29 Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 6.

30 Destradi, Indian Foreign and Security Policy in South Asia.

31 See Lintner, Great Game East.

32 Interestingly, this was initially designed to establish an access for India’s mainland via sea to its north-east region that was being denied by its eastern neighbour, Bangladesh.

33 The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation. Formed in 1997 and headquartered in Dhaka, BIMSTEC was moribund for years. With the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) taken hostage by Indo–Pakistani tensions, BIMSTEC gained some new impetus in the late 2010s.

34 Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal Initiative. The BBIN is a loose cooperation scheme focusing on concrete connectivity-related issues, such as the BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement.

35 Hampered by a lack of financial means when compared to China’s BRI, New Delhi has begun collaborating with Japan on several of the transport corridors within India as well as within Bangladesh (The Dhaka Metro Line). Whereas India has always been wary of any untoward presence in the north-east, involving Japan is viewed differently in terms of its own status as a geostrategic ally vis-à-vis China.

36 A similar and more successful initiative was the North–South Economic Corridor from Kunming to Bangkok and Hanoi. See Tubilewicz, “Paradiplomacy as a Provincial State-Building Project,” 931–49.

37 Summers, “(Re)Positioning Yunnan,” 446.

38 Indiresan, “Kunming Initiative.” 

39 Ibid.

40 Bhaumik, “Kolktata to Kunming.”

41 Author interviews with five former participants in the track-two process in May 2015: three academic experts in Delhi, one Bangladeshi think tanker in Dhaka and one senior Bangladeshi diplomat in Dhaka.

42 Gupta, How India Manages Its National Security.

43 See, for instance, Bhattacharjee, “Act East through Northeast.” Interestingly, West Bengal, despite being the endpoint of the prospective corridor, showed very little interest and, if it did, only supported the BCIM process in an ad hoc manner.

44 Krishnan, “China Highlights Outcome of Manmohan’s Visit.”

45 Interview with former diplomat engaged with the process, C. V. Ranganathan, 4 January 2020, Bangalore.

46 And, in fact, some scholars understand the BRI less as a novel initiative than as a unifying package for all these initiatives and projects that had been around already. See Summers, “China’s ‘New Silk Roads,’” 1628–43.

47 Iyer, “Reviving the Comatose Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor.”

48 Business Standard, “Modi Told China.”

49 Jain and Singh Maini, “India’s Subnational Governments Foray,” 305.

50 As Nimmi Kurian argues, India’s institutional fora such as the Ministry of External Affairs’ States Division and the Inter-State Council, so far, failed to effectively mediate between border states and the centre. See Kurian, Future Is Federal. In fact, an assessment of 314 episodes of international engagements by India’s states, from 1996 to 2018, revealed that subnational states’ engagement in international affairs was a function of the partisan political relationship the state incumbents have with the national incumbents. See Sharma, Destradi, and Plagemann, “Partisan Federalism and Subnational Governments’ International Engagements,” 566–92.

51 See, for instance, Saran, “Role of Border States in India’s Foreign Policy.”

52 Press Trust of India. “India Plans to Connect North East with Bangladesh’s Chittagong Port: Madhav,” India Today, August 15, 2018. https://www.indiatoday.in/pti-feed/story/india-plans-to-connect-north-east-with-bangladesh-s-chittagong-port-madhav-1315378-2018-08-15

53 The Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. “Joint Communique of the Leaders’ Roundtable of the 2nd Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.” April 27, 2019. http://www.beltandroadforum.org/english/n100/2019/0427/c36-1311.html

54 See, for instance, Ramachandran, “Trouble with India’s Projects in Myanmar.”

55 Including greatly diverging capacities on behalf of India’s state governments to engage in paradiplomacy; interview with two anonymous South Asian diplomatic sources (2015 and 2017).

56 See Kurian, Future Is Federal.

57 See, for instance, Rahman, ‘Pickled’ Infrastructure and Connectivity.

58 Rüland and Arndt, “How China and India Compete.”

59 ‘Chinese analysts recognize that Russia’s rapprochement with China is driven by Western sanctions’: see Makocki, Silk Road Goes North, 7.

60 China prior to 2013 tried to move the SCO towards closer economic cooperation and policy coordination in areas such as energy to trade and, perhaps eventually, a free trade area. Once it became clear that Russia resisted this, Chinese efforts shifted toward OBOR and later the BRI. Yet, ‘Russia’s concerns about growing Chinese influence in Central Asia have not gone away’. See Bolt and Cross, China, Russia, and Twenty-First Century Global Geopolitics, 76–7.

61 Köstem, “Russia’s Search for a Greater Eurasia.”

62 Mueller, “Challenges to ASEAN Centrality and Hedging.”

63 Gabusi, “No Losers?,” 96–108.

64 Rafee, “Bangladesh’s Tryst with China’s BRI.”

65 Plagemann, “Small States and Competing Connectivity Strategies.”

66 For evidence from Bangladesh, see ibid. For quantitative evidence, see Hernandez, “Are ‘New’ Donors Challenging World Bank Conditionality?,” 529–49.

67 Zeitz, “Emulate or Differentiate?,” 265–92.

68 For a detailed comparison of foreign policy interests at the centre and in China’s Yunnan province, see Liu and Song, “Beyond the Hinterland.”

69 Jacob, Putting the Periphery at the Center.

70 See Jones and Zeng, “Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’” 1422, 1428.

71 Kanai and Schindler, “Peri-Urban Promises of Connectivity.”

72 See Rüland, “Old Wine in New Bottles?,” 9–10.

73 Ibid., 10.

74 Consider the Bangladeshi power sector, where emergency powers have been renewed repeatedly, thereby circumventing the legal need for open tenders and opening the door for corruption alongside major foreign investments. According to the World Bank in 2017, infrastructure costs in Bangladesh exceed costs in any other country. See BDNews24.com, “Bangladesh Infrastructure Is World’s Costliest.” Elsewhere, too, ‘[crony-driven] development deepens existing social inequalities, facilitates widespread social injustices such as indiscriminate land grabbing by government officials in Cambodia and Myanmar, and poses serious obstacles to social reform policies’; see Rüland, “Old Wine in New Bottles?,” 10.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johannes Plagemann

Johannes Plagemann is a political scientist and Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Hamburg, Germany (since 2010). In 2019/2020 he was Deputy Professor of political science with a focus on area studies China/East Asia at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt. In 2016/2017 he served as an External Policy Analyst at the Political Directorate-General of the German Federal Foreign Office. He works on the intersection of foreign policy analysis, international relations and comparative politics. He currently coordinates the research project Legitimate Multipolarity, which interrogates the legitimacy of international organisations in a multipolar world, and he is one of two principal investigators in the research project Populism and Foreign Policy. His research interests include populism and international relations, rising powers in international politics, Indian foreign policy, and small states’ foreign policy between major power rivalries.

Sreeradha Datta

Sreeradha Datta currently heads the Neighbourhood Studies Centre of the Vivekananda International Foundation, New Delhi, India, and is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore. With a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, she is the former Director of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, and held fellowships with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses IDSA, among other institutions. Apart from her two recent books, Act East Policy and Northeast India and Bangladesh at 50: Development and Challenges (co-edited), she has written and edited six books and monographs on Bangladesh, South-East Asia and Myanmar and published over 130 articles in journals, edited volumes, newspapers and academic websites. Her research interests include India’s foreign policy, regionalism and cross-border studies. Her edited volume on BIMSTEC: The Journey and Way Ahead is due for publication shortly.

Sinan Chu

Sinan Chu is Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Institute for Asian Studies in Hamburg, Germany. He obtained his PhD in political science from Syracuse University in 2019. His research interests include authoritarian politics, international relations theory, science and politics, and legitimacy in global governance, with a regional focus on the People’s Republic of China. At GIGA, he is presently involved in two research projects: Legitimate Multipolarity and Drifting Apart: International Institutions in Crisis and the Management of Dissociation Processes. He taught at Syracuse University Beijing Center from 2014 to 2015 and Hamburg University in 2018.