Theorizing China-world integration: sociospatial reconfigurations and the modern silk roads

Abstract

This paper develops a spatial perspective to examine the nature of China’s transnational influence, focusing on the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for international relations. Drawing upon political economy, regional studies and critical geopolitics, we argue that the most interesting puzzle concerning the BRI pertains to the ongoing reconfigurations of political space. Contemporary sociospatial reconfigurations as analyzed through a multidimensional framework offer key insights into the operations and the extent of China’s growing global power in general and with respect to the BRI in particular. We draw on a broad range of materials such as maps, Chinese academic and policy discourse as well as observations about corridor projects to theorize (a) how the spatiality of global and regional connectivity is reconfigured through the process of China’s integration with the world; and (b) how corridorization as a dominant physical and ideational process shapes Chinese investment projects and reconfigures state spatiality along the BRI. The results indicate that the main territorial pattern is not the nation or the region but the corridor. Furthermore, expansionist and unidirectional stories of China’s growing power overlook the local encounters and negotiations necessary for infrastructure projects to succeed. In addition, China’s economic statecraft is contextualized within the ongoing post-financial crisis political-economic restructuring of territories, places, and scales within the global capitalist system.

Keywords:

• Territorial rescaling
• sociospatial structuration
• Belt and Road Initiative
• China
• corridor
• Euro-Asia

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Review of International Political Economy for their helpful comments. Previous versions of this paper have been presented at workshops at the University Nottingham Ningbo China and the National University of Singapore where we received invaluable feedback from participants. Thanks to Lewis Sanders for a helping hand with the language of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See special issues in International Affairs on maritime zoning (International Affairs 2019, Volume 95, Issue 5), in Geopolitics on politics of border (Geopolitics 2019, Volume 24, Issue 2), and in Territory, Politics, Governance on metropolitan scales (Territory, Politics Governance 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2).

2 For the concept of ‘Eurasian moment’, please see Bordachev (2015) and Yang (2014).

3 One map presenting the original list of 65 BRI countries is available at Chin and He (2016, p. 1).

4 All these maps are available from the authors upon request.

5 One such representative BRI map is available at http://www.cssn.cn/jjx/jjx_gdxw/201502/t20150210_1512135.shtml?COLLCC=563023871&.

6 One BRI map illustrating these 6 corridors is available at http://china-trade-research.hktdc.com/business-news/article/The-Belt-and-Road-Initiative/The-Belt-and-Road-Initiative/obor/en/1/1X000000/1X0A36B7.htm.

7 Kaczmarski (2017) reaches a similar conclusion when comparing different regionalism embodied in the Eurasian Economic Union promoted by Russia and China’s BRI.

8 Similarly, Chinese researchers claim that ‘The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor is buttressed by key transportation lines and combined transportation routes, take cities and ports (Kunming, Mandalay, Dhaka, Chittagong, Kolkata) as key knots/hubs, to facilitate connectivity and social economic development on sub-regional trans-national levels, which is meant to take energy transportation, trade, industrial cooperation and humanitarian communication as the key priorities. Its purpose is to align connections among economic and trade routes and development axis (‘spindle’) which connect Southwest China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, West Bengal of India, the east and Northeast part of India’ (Liu & Lu, 2017, p. 1).

9 For a discussion of on the notion of infrastructure corridors as spatial form of economic development see: Wilson and Bayón (2016), Bouzarovski, et al. (2015), and Hildyard and Sol (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maximilian Mayer

Maximilian Mayer is assistant professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He is research fellow at Renmin University Beijing, worked as Research Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai (2015–2018), and was senior researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society of the Technical University Munich (2018–2019). Maximilian was visiting scholar at Harvard Kennedy School, Program on Science, Technology and Society, and section co-chair of STAIR (Science, Technology, Arts and international relations) of the International Studies Association (2015–2017). He holds a PhD from Bonn University and is co-editor of the two-volume work The Global Politics of Science and Technology (Springer 2014), coeditor of Art and Sovereignty in Global Politics (Palgrave, 2016), and editor of Rethinking the Silk-Road: Chinas Belt and Road Initiative and Emerging Eurasian Relations (Palgrave, 2018).

Xin Zhang

Xin Zhang is associate professor at the School of Advanced International and Area Studies, and a research fellow at the Center for Russian Studies, East China Normal University in Shanghai. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was on the faculty at Reed College, OR, US. His research interests include comparative political economy, Russia and Eurasia, critical geopolitics, and global governance. His research appears in Geopolitics, Osteuropa, Russia in Global Affairs, and China Journal.