Boundary-making with India: Chinese developmental identity and the uses of geography

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines the geography-based representations of India’s development, or lack thereof, in narratives by Chinese scholars and commentators, and how they make visible the continually reconfigured processes of territorializing China’s developmental identity in lieu of its contemporary rise. Existing analysis has unpicked the growing deployment of culturally embedded historical reasoning in various Chinese discourses and works to characterize China’s domestic and foreign policies. This article, however, teases out the slim evidence currently available in popular, scholarly narratives that used environmentally deterministic geographical reasoning to justify China’s civilizational uniqueness and developmental success. By boundary-making with India as a symbol of difference, Chinese intellectual elites project their aspirations and anxieties about China’s identity both as a nation and as an enduring civilization. While most discussions about China’s (inter)national identity are anchored in the East–West and North–South axes, it is argued that juxtaposition within the East–South can be just as, if not more, revealing of the complexity and ambiguity in China’s search for its ‘place’ in the world.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• India
• development
• geography
• territorial differentiation
• boundary-making

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We owe special thanks to Itty Abraham for his generosity and insights. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Diplomacy and Development in India’s ‘Civilisational State’ Conference at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, Newnham College, Cambridge, UK, 28–29 October 2021. We thank the organizers and participants for their useful feedback. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See www.aisixiang.com/. Although beyond the scope of this article, these mushrooming platforms in and of themselves deserve critical scrutiny in terms of their activities, affiliations and impact, which can enrich our understandings of the manipulation and cultivation of the ‘imaginative geographies’ that underpin China’s citizen intellectual space (Davies, 2008).

2 Additionally, blogs and postings from Chinese social media platforms have been used, but to illustrate the tone of the debate in what is a highly biased landscape of popular views, rather than as evidence to support our arguments.

3 India’s geographical (dis)advantages are a subject of intense interest in Chinese (social) media (e.g., 163 News, 2020; Zhihu, 2019).

4 Zhang fails to acknowledge that India too is capable of trans-territorial connectivity projects, including the launch of the Golden Quadrilateral highway network project in 2001, and the construction of the Ken–Betwa River Linking Project since 2021. Nor does he recognize the many setbacks and pitfalls of Chinese grand development plans (Wilson et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) [grant number 2019QZKK1007] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42171180].