Intervention with Chinese characteristics: the Belt and Road Initiative reconfiguring (Afro-)Eurasian geo-economics

ABSTRACT

With the increasing influence of China, the future of its non-interference policy is being increasingly debated both in China and abroad. This contribution investigates the question of intervention with Chinese characteristics by focusing on the ‘geo’ in the geo-economics of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is spatially reterritorialising the social geography of (Afro-)Eurasia. This reconfiguration challenges intervention research. By analysing the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as an illustration, this article argues that the geo-economic social geography of BRI is supplanting the current geopolitical social geography (dominated by the USA). Through geo-economic interventions, Chinese infrastructure projects create new geo-economic connectivity through corridors in various territories, which have been rendered simply geo-politicised (Pakistan or Iran) or insignificant (Africa) in the global economy. The article concludes by discussing some implications of geo-economic interventions for intervention research.

KEYWORDS:

• Geo-economics
• intervention
• Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
• China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)

There are gradual but palpable tectonic shifts unfolding in global geo-economics. In this dynamic landscape, China is currently the most forceful driver through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), commonly and discursively known as the New Silk Roads (NSR). The geo-economics of Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe are becoming spatially reconfigured by connectivity, rendering China’s declared ‘non-interference’ policy open-ended and contestable.

Non-interference in the domestic affairs of other sovereign countries is one of the five core principles of China’s foreign policy. It is being increasingly debated how the Chinese non-interference principle is becoming contradictory,¹ or strengthening national states,² or how it is distinct from or possibly on a potential collision course with Western liberal interventionism.³ The debates in China have branched out in three ways: whether to abandon this principle, strengthen it, or make it more flexible.⁴ This piece analyses the issue by systematising the debates surrounding interventionism from a spatial perspective by focusing on the ‘geo’ in geo-economics.

My argument is threefold and will subsequently structure this article. First, I will unpack the two concepts of BRI and NSR, the former in terms of its technical geo-economic dimensions and the latter in terms of the zeitgeist it represents. Second, I will outline how the BRI is reconfiguring the global geo-economic landscape, especially across the geography of Afro-Eurasia. This reconfiguration draws heavily on the geographies and histories of the ancient Silk Roads. And third, the implications of this reconfiguration for intervention research will be discussed by analysing the case of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as an illustration. I will explore some of the ways in which China’s geo-economic interventions at a global scale can be interpreted in terms of the ‘geo-economic social’ reterritorialising the ‘geopolitical social’.

The BRI and NSRs: geo-economics

The BRI is a geo-economic initiative involving around 70 countries along the land-based ‘belt’ or the ‘maritime road’ impacting more than two-thirds of the world’s population. It envisions a geo-economic ‘connectivity’ across the various geographies of Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe. Through co-operation with these countries, China is creating new, or improving already existing, infrastructures of transport, technological, cultural and economic connectivity.⁵

The key word in all this is infrastructure. The BRI partly addresses China’s surplus infrastructure capacity and aims to address the infrastructural insufficiencies in other countries. However, it cannot be reduced to infrastructure alone. It involves, inter alia, trade and commerce on the land-based belt and maritime road, technology transfer, industrial hubs, ICTs, energy security connectivity (both traditional and green), financial institutions (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or AIIB), bilateral and multilateral arrangements, strategic partnerships and free trade initiatives as part of the BRI.

The BRI is also a Chinese or Asian dream – a ‘vision’ or ‘concept’ that China and other participants have discursively adopted to refer to the (re-)emerging world of Silk Roads. The discursive NSR promotes civilisational interactions, cultural diplomacy, soft power initiatives (globally, more than 500 Confucius Institutes), educational exchange programmes and tourism. Through the NSR, China is moving beyond the end-of-history thesis,⁶ reigniting history (if it ever ended at all) and reterritorialising Afro-Eurasian geographies.

Reterritorialising and reconfiguring

The economic BRI and the discursive NSR are dialectically interlinked through the spatiotemporal parameters they assume. Historically and geographically, they aim at a revival of the ancient Silk Roads network which was a transcontinental phenomenon, a set of pre-modern patterns of globalisation across Afro-Eurasia, where local and nomadic actors mattered as much as regional or global actors.⁷ However, it was not China-dominated: various empires rose and fell in the two millennia of the Silk Roads, all of which had a different discourse about this transcontinental geo-economic network of roads and caravanserais that facilitated exchanges of various kinds, not merely commercial trade.⁸ Ideas, religions, philosophies, architectural styles, medical knowledges and diseases were exchanged, among other things. It was a multifaceted network with a multiplicity of significant actors.

That past is a lively subject across Eurasia, with the BRI dramatically changing the political impetus for cultural sector co-operation. (Afro-)Eurasia is thus being reconfigured discursively and geographically. The ‘geo’ in the geo-economics of the NSR is of immense significance. Frankopan calls it Afro-Eurasia,⁹ Calder refers to ‘new continentalism’ as the new geographic imaginary,¹⁰ while Summers calls it a ‘spatial fix’ rooted in sub-national spaces.¹¹ Regardless of the term, the BRI/NSR is reterritorialising vast global spaces in new ways.

Intervention research and the geo-economics of BRI

The NSR/BRI (if successfully continued) challenges social science generally and intervention research particularly. The first implication is the need for a systematic development of geo-economics as a field of enquiry, which is currently underdeveloped, especially with a focus on the ‘geo’. This entails a rethinking of history and geography in our understanding of geo-economics.

Cowen and Smith argue ‘that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social’ and that ‘geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography’.¹² Along the same lines of thinking, I argue that the geo-economic interventions of the BRI are slowly reconfiguring the geopolitical social that has been the dominant global social order since at least World War II.

Intervention research as a field of enquiry is in a unique position to investigate this reconfiguration. If this field of enquiry is fundamentally about how certain local, (sub)national, (inter-)regional or global assemblages are transformed (forcibly or otherwise) by various actors or factors, then, the BRI provides ample opportunity for intervention research and its self-evaluation, especially in terms of the broadening of the very conception of intervention and how the politics of intervention is designed and implemented.¹³

Geo-economic investigation requires nuanced conceptions of social geographies that simultaneously include markets, societies and geopolitics.¹⁴ In terms of the BRI, research on Chinese intervention requires a multifaceted cross-disciplinary analysis. The Chinese government, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), businesses and corporations, diplomatic corps, cultural and academic organisations and security forces act and speak in a more or less uniform and targeted fashion when they enter a BRI space.

In what follows, I will use the case of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to shed light on how China’s intervention in Pakistan can be considered as a geo-economic reterritorialisation of Pakistan in an embedded type of analysis. China in this example represents the geo-economic social actor juxtaposed with the USA as the geopolitical social actor. CPEC is the most developed of the six official corridors of the BRI. China has pledged US$ 65 billion and has already spent more than US$ 12 billion. It provides a good illustration of how China is practicing geo-economic intervention on a large scale.

Pakistan is a territory that in the geopolitical social (of the Cold War and the US-dominated post-Cold War eras) has been reduced to a mainly geopolitical space of either Western military intervention (drone warfare) or a military logistical corridor to support the US invasion of Afghanistan. There has been regular financial and military aid to Pakistan from the USA, which also amounts to another geopolitical routine to maintain Pakistan as a geopoliticised territory. Through the large-scale, multi-pronged investments (read, geo-economic intervention) of CPEC, China is reterritorialising and revitalising Pakistan’s territory, making it relevant (even perhaps crucial) to regional and global affairs. Some new CPEC dimensions include new infrastructure projects, transportation networks (such as highways, railways, roads and tunnels), energy infrastructure, industrial zones, free economic zones, modernisation of the port of Gwadar and cultural interactions through soft power initiatives. All such projects impact intimately on the local geography and socio-economic development of Pakistan.

This geo-economic reterritorialisation of Pakistan can be addressed in two ways: domestic and regional. Domestically, focusing solely on Pakistan’s territory and economy, China is energising the Pakistani economy and bringing Pakistan, with its massive economic potential and young sizable population, within China’s economic orbit. China is also exporting its surplus capacity in the infrastructure sector to an infrastructurally impoverished Pakistan.

The underlying security thinking for CPEC’s geo-economic interventions is ‘security through development’, namely, the argument that deep-rooted security challenges (such as extremism, radicalisation and separatism or poverty) are best tackled through a long-term approach to economic development, or so the official Chinese discourse goes. Such development starts, in the Chinese model, with building infrastructure projects but certainly goes beyond these.

China is implementing the same security approach in its own Western region. Part of the domestic logic of the BRI is to turn the restive province of Xinjiang into an energy hub for China, Central Asia and the Middle East (via CPEC),¹⁵ based on the same official discourse of security through development.

The same approach to security is why China has been arguing for dialogue with the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, as this is seen as necessary for CPEC’s security. This is, of course, opposite to US (geopolitical) interventions in this region, which have been security-oriented with regular drone warfare in Pakistan and the invasion of Afghanistan; such geopolitical interventions perpetuate security problems by creating more enemies among local populations.

From a regional perspective, CPEC has several dimensions, which are reterritorialising regional and even global configurations. CPEC reduces China’s dependence on the strategic chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca, often referred to as The Malacca Dilemma.¹⁶ This has commercial, geopolitical and energy security implications for China (and others). Commercially, it reduces (when fully operationalised) the shipping distance to China from the Middle East, Africa and Europe by thousands of kilometres (while also geo-strategically avoiding the Strait of Malacca). CPEC connectivity saves both time and transport costs, for both energy and commercial goods; and connects China and Pakistan to Africa (via the port of Gwadar), to the Middle East, and via Middle East (through Iran and Turkey) to Europe through pipelines, roads, highways and railways. CPEC implicates Pakistan in more regional affairs and dynamics than previously (geopolitically) possible for the country.

Another regional consequence of CPEC is the solidification of Pakistani positions in Kashmir in a de facto sense, which makes India increasingly concerned. CPEC also goes around India’s western border, which has created the perception of containment in some Indian circles. India’s concerns are leading it to come up with its own south–north geo-economic initiatives. One such initiative goes through Iran (India investing in the Port of Chabahar, not far from Gwadar). In practice, however, such Indian initiatives are in their preliminary stages compared to CPEC and the BRI in general. Nonetheless, these are Indian geo-economic interventions competing in part with the BRI.

The multifaceted approach of China to Pakistan and its reterritorialisation of Pakistani space (domestically, regionally and globally) is an example of how China is reconfiguring not only its own restive provinces, and Pakistani economy and society, but also creating new regional and even global assemblages, while disassembling some established arrangements. All this through one corridor, CPEC.

Another example that could be unpacked along the same lines is Obama’s 2012 Pivot to Asia. This geopolitical intervention failed rather quickly. Indeed, one of the main reasons for its failure was that the Pivot was essentially a geopolitical (security-oriented and militaristic) response to the essentially (geo-)economic rise of China.¹⁷

The relationship between geo-economic and geopolitical intervention is, therefore, an interesting avenue for intervention research to explore. The larger question is whether geopolitical interventions are embedded within (Chinese) geo-economic interventions or whether geopolitics is produced as a consequence of such geo-economic interventions. The former seems more likely to be the answer; however, the two answers are not mutually exclusive.

Along with ‘connectivity’, the idea of ‘corridors’ is also underdeveloped as a systematic concept in the social sciences. Connectivity-based reconfiguration through the BRI takes place (both geographically and discursively) through ‘corridorisation’.¹⁸ The BRI has six corridors. Competing corridors are appearing such as the Africa Asia Growth Corridor initiated by India, Japan and African countries. Creation of such competing corridors bespeaks a changing world, where the geo-economic social actors such as China and India are changing global spaces through geo-economic interventions.

Methodologically speaking, intervention research can explore how geo-economic corridors are both poetically and politically¹⁹ developed in different stages: conception, construction and implementation. To theorise BRI (and its key terms such as corridorisation and connectivity), a bottom-up embedded approach focused on both discursive and economic geographies of infrastructure projects (and how they transform local, national and regional assemblages) can be a nuanced theoretical avenue to explore.

The geopolitical social world dominated by the USA has rendered some spaces geopoliticised and some of little global economic significance. BRI is reconfiguring such geopolitically hot and geo-economically dormant spaces, such as Iran (sanctions and threats of intervention by the USA), Pakistan (drone interventions and logistics of the Afghanistan invasion) and Africa (relegated to the global economic periphery).

China’s geo-economic interventions can thus be summarised as follows. China is entering those geopoliticised or economically ignored spaces and turning the geopolitical social geography into a geo-economic one. This takes place through infrastructure projects creating connectivity and corridors. These interventions create new geo-economic dynamics that change the very conditions in which geopolitics and its interventions can be practiced. The NSR is the name of this re-emerging world, in which the Chinese BRI is producing such multifaceted geo-economic interventions.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Florian Kühn and Mandy Turner for the intellectual support and invaluable commentary they provided me in the process of writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammadbagher Forough

Mohammadbagher Forough is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University, The Netherlands, and Research Associate at Clingendael Institute, the Netherlands. His research interests include contemporary China-Middle East relations and Iranian foreign policy.

Notes

1. Large, ‘China & the Contradictions’.

2. See Condon, ‘China in Africa’.

3. Dunn et al., ‘Western Interventionism versus East Asian Non-interference’.

4. Zheng, ‘China Debates the Non-Interference Principle’.

5. For a full description of the project, see Huang, ‘Understanding China’s Belt & Road Initiative.’

6. Godehardt, ‘No End of History’.

7. Christian, ‘Silk Roads or Steppe Roads?’.

8. Liu, The Silk Road in World History.

9. Frankopan, The Silk Roads.

10. Calder, The New Continentalism.

11. Summers, ‘China’s “New Silk Roads”’.

12. Cowen and Smith, ‘After Geopolitics?’.

13. See the introductory chapter in Turner and Kühn, The Politics of International Intervention.

14. Gonzales-Vincente, ‘The Limits to China’s Non-interference Foreign Policy’.

15. Clarke, ‘China’s Integration of Xinjiang with Central Asia’.

16. Zhang, ‘China’s Energy Security’.

17. Ross, ‘The Problem with the Pivot’.

18. Mayer, Rethinking the Silk Road, 212–213.

19. Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics’.