Producing multiple imaginations of the Silk Road in Xi’an, China’s urban development

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at how the Chinese government’s recent national project, ‘the Belt and Road Initiatives’ (the BRI), is played out at the local level in the context of cultural cities. Scholarship on the BRI focuses less on how the official narratives of the BRI have impacted the ongoing process of urbanization in China. This paper contextualizes the BRI by examining how both official and alternative imaginations of the Silk Road contribute to municipal-level urban plans that visualize the Silk Road in the urban built environment. Specifically, this paper suggests understanding the Silk Road in the local context, which entails a constellation of convergent and divergent interpretations by different actors involved in the official urban theming plans. These actors, both experts involved in the implementation process and members of marginalized ethnic communities, specify the vaguely defined ‘Silk Road’ in contexts that are within and beyond the original settings.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• cultural city
• Hui Muslims
• the belt and road initiative

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions. I would also like to extend my thanks to the guest editors for their comments and feedback. Finally, I wish to thank my contacts in Xi’an, China for their support during my ethnographic fieldwork there.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yang Yang

Yang Yang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.