Deglobalization and China’s Visions for Reconfiguring Development Space

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen proliferating media references to ‘deglobalization’, frequently drawing historical analogies with periods of crisis and dislocation, such as the 1930s. At the same time, scholars have traced shifting geographies of development as a multi-centred unfolding of capitalist dynamics, entanglements and worldmaking projects, amidst failures and crises in/of development, sometimes discussed in terms of ‘abjection’. Negotiating these conjunctures and narratives, this paper re-considers and contextualises media debates about deglobalization, placing them in discussion with how Chinese narratives are re-visualising global development. In tracing the rise of ‘New Development Thinking’ (新发展理念) in China, we consider how global development as a project has increasingly come to occupy centre-stage in China’s sense of repositioning itself as a world power. Our conclusions reflect on the resultant consequences and challenges.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. On the notion of worldmaking, as projects of re-ordering the world, see Adom Getachew’s landmark Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Getachew 2019) and in related terms, see Musab Younis’ history of anticolonial Black and subaltern thinking On the Scale of the World (Younis 2022).

2. An official map of the BRI has not been published. As Narins and Agnew argue (2019), a ‘missing map’ allows the BRI to exist and operate as both concrete and ethereal, a ‘useful fuzziness’ that makes the BRI appear inevitable but at the same time flexible (if not also wholly uncertain).