Environment, development, and security politics in the production of Belt and Road spaces

ABSTRACT

China’s deepening ties with central Eurasian countries through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cannot be considered apart from the material conditions that gave rise to citizen mobilizations within heavily polluted coal and rare-earth mining sites in western China. Coal and rare earths are critical inputs for China’s energy production, and hence economic growth, but their extraction has caused considerable social and environmental harm. The ways in which policy elites in China and BRI partner states address development and security concerns through shifting extractive geographies provides a lens through which to examine how seemingly disconnected spatial practices comprise the BRI. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in China from 2011 to 2013, and on media and government documents from the United States, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan from 2013 to 2018, this paper examines how international and grassroots environmental pressures informed broader policy approaches to BRI implementation in specific cases. It uses Lefebvrian spatial theory to examine the production of terrestrial, subterranean and orbital BRI spaces in China and Central Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Belt and Road Initiative
• rare earth elements
• coal
• environment
• infrastructure
• development
• satellites

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks Mohammad Abbas Taqi, Samantha Robertson and Avery Hall for research assistance. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and the editors for engagement with earlier versions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Tracy, Shvarts, Simonov, and Babenko (2017) for analyses of ‘the race to the bottom’ and Bin and Guansheng (2016) for dynamics of new ‘pollution havens’.

2 This process has been extensively studied in western China and Central Asia. The concept has also been critiqued (e.g., Zukosky, 2007).

3 A note on the politics of grammar. In some cases, official interviews or specific observations are cited. Where citing primary sources could expose potentially vulnerable subjects, the paper resorts to the passive voice. In these instances, it instead provides citations to multilingual, publicly available and peer-reviewed literature that substantiates the topics discussed. This cautious approach still allows for conceptual and theoretical contributions to literature on territory, politics and governance in general, and to BRI-related literature in particular. For a discussion of fieldwork methodologies, see Klinger (2017, pp. 38–40, 243–250).

4 Interview with the National Development and Reform Commission of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, September 2013.

5 Interview with a State Council member, Beijing, August 2013.

6 Interview with a People’s Standing Committee Member, Hohhot, April 2013.

7 For a discussion of this practice by the US Department of the Interior in the 20th century, see Black (2018).

8 ‘Concrete facts’ actually refers to existing features of the built environment and material relations between people (i.e., who gets what, under what conditions) (e.g., Lefebvre, 2016).

9 Ministerial statement made during a public event in Boston, 1 March 2016.

10 PowerPoint is hosted at the following link:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4322811-The-Prince-Pitch.html (last accessed October 9, 2018).