Exploring China’s borderlands in an era of BRI-induced change

ABSTRACT

China’s borderlands have received increased investment and policy attention since Beijing formally launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This special issue, comprised of four research articles and a photo essay, is designed to provide a timely intervention into the growing literature seeking to situate and assess this important policy campaign. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in China’s southwestern, northwestern, and northern borderlands, the contributing authors analyze recent borderland transformations against the backdrop of the BRI. However, by shifting the analytical focus to prioritize voices and events in borderlands, the papers de-center Beijing-centric discourse on the BRI, and provide urgent reminders of region-specific geographies and histories. Taken together, the papers underscore the persistent social complexity of borderland situations, revealing intricate processes of resistance, adaptation, and muddling through, while highlighting continuities and ruptures associated with the present moment.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• borderlands
• frontiers
• Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
• center-periphery relations
• internal colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Minzu are officially designated population categories in China; there are 56 of them. Minzu is translated either as “nation” or “nationality” (in Stalinist terms), or more recently and increasingly, especially in the official nomenclature, as “ethnic group.”

2. See Oakes (2012) for a discussion on how China’s border regions have been territorialized as “peripheries” in an effort to reproduce the idea of a unitary Han Chinese culture and ethnicity.

3. For other studies advancing or discussing a similar understanding of the state see: Mitchell (1991); Painter (2006); Navaro-Yashin (2012); Dalakoglou (2010); Anand (2017); Laszczkowski (2015); Reeves (2014).

4. Similarly to: Lattimore (1951); Bellér-Hann, Cesàro, Harris, and Smith Finley (2007); Bulag (1998) and Davis (2003).

5. For a similar argument made by another special issue in this journal with regard to urban research in China, see Tang (2019).