China’s vision of invoking the ancient Silk Road to frame its inter-regional Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) opens up intellectual and political spaces for debating twenty-first century international order in Asia. However, what has emerged from President Xi Jinping’s most elaborate articulation of the BRI is a top down process and one that envisions a distinct position for Chinese strategic leadership. Two large portions of Xi’s speech at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on 14 May 2017 bear this out. This first part establishes a less than subtle China-centred discourse on what the BRI means:
Yet in the preamble of this speech, Xi honoured the memory of ancient Silk Road travellers such as Du Huan of China, Marco Polo of Italy and Ibn Battuta of Morocco. He neglected to note that these were independent individuals and in many cases, spiritually motivated ones. Moreover, sovereign states had not existed at that time. Xi then lauded the ancient Silk Road as manifesting the virtues of peace and cooperation, mutual learning, openness and inclusiveness and other win-win outcomes. This is a certainly positive note and a nod to ‘history [as] our best teacher’ (Xi Jinping 2017). In subsequent paragraphs, Xi went against this current by elaborating on people-to-people exchanges as an appendage of state-led efforts at forging harmonious relations on the BRI:In the autumn of 2013, respectively in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, I proposed the building of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which I call the Belt and Road Initiative. As a Chinese saying goes, “Peaches and plums do not speak, but they are so attractive that a path is formed below the trees.” Four years on, over 100 countries and international organizations have supported and got involved in this initiative. Important resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly and Security Council contain reference to it. Thanks to our efforts, the vision of the Belt and Road Initiative is becoming a reality and bearing rich fruit.These [past] four years have seen deepened policy connectivity. I have said on many occasions that the pursuit of the Belt and Road Initiative is not meant to reinvent the wheel. Rather, it aims to complement the development strategies of countries involved by leveraging their comparative strengths. We have enhanced coordination with the policy initiatives of relevant countries, such as the Eurasian Economic Union of Russia, the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity, the Bright Road initiative of Kazakhstan, the Middle Corridor initiative of Turkey, the Development Road initiative of Mongolia, the Two Corridors, One Economic Circle initiative of Viet Nam, the Northern Powerhouse initiative of the UK and the Amber Road initiative of Poland. We are also promoting complementarity between China’s development plan and those of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Hungary and other countries. (Xi Jinping 2017)
There is a built-in irony to all this. People-to-people relations should ideally be unforced and even spontaneous. But the state—specifically the Chinese state—has to count the quality of social interactions in terms of the volume of scholarships, numbers of exchanges, tourism events, ‘culture year’ and art festivals, and so forth. In short, this is bureaucratic framing of the twenty-first century Silk Road that detracts from the latter’s historical precedent.These [past] four years have seen strengthened people-to-people connectivity. Friendship, which derives from close contact between the people, holds the key to sound state-to-state relations. Guided by the Silk Road spirit, we the Belt and Road Initiative participating countries have pulled our efforts to build the educational Silk Road and the health Silk Road, and carried out cooperation in science, education, culture, health and people-to-people exchange. Such cooperation has helped lay a solid popular and social foundation for pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative. Every year, the Chinese government provides 10,000 government scholarships to the relevant countries. China’s local governments have also set up special Silk Road scholarships to encourage international cultural and educational exchanges. Projects of people-to-people cooperation such as Silk Road culture year, tourism year, art festival, film and TV project, seminar and think tank dialogue are flourishing. These interactions have brought our people increasingly closer.These fruitful outcomes show that the Belt and Road Initiative responds to the trend of the times, conforms to the law of development, and meets the people’s interests. It surely has broad prospects. (Xi Jinping 2017)
Understandably, the discourse of the BRI today needs to accommodate significant aspects of modernity thriving amongst the states and societies partaking in the BRI. Modern and modernizing states tend to be jealous of preserving their own sovereign powers and institutionalizing the domestic rule of law. Many Asian states have also yet to fully build nations that are inclusive of all ethnicities and accepting of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled. Additionally, many Asian states, including democratic ones, officially practice a national ideology that guides development and national stability. This is an inevitable offshoot of modernization. But this road to modernization is fraught with uneven accomplishments and reversals (Apter 1965; Diamond et al. 1987). State-society relations may occasionally be tense over matters such as economic distress, the gap between rich and poor, environmental disasters and ethnic representation in government. Connecting all these conditions along the geographical expanse of the BRI will prove extremely challenging.
Hence, in this book we contribute to scholarship on China’s BRI by examining the many possibilities that the BRI is about adjusting paradigms and frameworks of cooperation between peoples, economies and states, as well as occasionally philosophizing about what connectivity can holistically mean in the twenty-first century. We are not being critical of China’s BRI as an agent of possible displacement and initiator of a new Asian international order from an ideological standpoint. As President Xi’s remarks have rightly alluded, the BRI is an unprecedented strategic vision but it also needs to be examined in terms of which obstacles it might encounter. Additionally, the BRI has upped the ante at a moment of intellectual efflorescence in the study of international relations: The inquiry into forms of non-western ‘IR’ that posit fluidity, plurality and harmony between peoples as much as states (Ling 2014; Chong 2012). More comprehensively, we have asked the authors of the various chapters to probe at the implications of what BRI means for inclusiveness or exclusiveness of development on national, regional and international scales.
Normative Concerns and the Shadow of Geopolitical Censorship
In prefacing the variety of critical chapters to this volume, we are mindful of carefully justifying the selection of authors on the understanding that most grand projects conceptualized by empires of the past, as well as more recent great powers, carry with them their particular inward oriented justifications. The scholarship of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Ronald Deibert have persistently argued that territorial projects are often accompanied by biases in these powers’ communication policies and technologies. In studying the ancient Greek civilizational empire for instance, Innis came to the conclusion that despite the odd example of Sparta, most of the factionalized Greek city states never approximated the absolutist empires of Asia at the time. In Innis’ view, ‘the powerful oral tradition of the Greeks and the flexibility of the alphabet enabled them to resist the tendencies of empire in the East towards absolute monarchism and theocracy’ (Innis 2007, p. 104). Likewise, when one scrutinizes the enunciation of the BRI in relation to the governing conditions within the People’s Republic of China, one quickly realizes that Beijing is controlling the discourse of promoting the BRI very tightly. As internal official documents have elaborated it, the Xi government has announced that critical attitudes towards China articulated under the influence of liberal openness or from western sources are collectively a national security threat (Buckley 2013; Myers and Cheng, 68 things, 2017). This extends likewise to discussions of the BRI. On the other hand, Beijing sees no contradiction between restricting critical thought and promoting pro-China propaganda through Chinese language courses, Confucius Institutes and even online adult education courses. The entire climate of corporate and journalism-driven financial news reporting has come under a cloud of censorship (Hernandez 2015; Tsang 2015). Beijing makes no apologies for sanitizing the Internet of content deemed inimical to China’s national security (Myers and Wee, China feels vindicated, 2017).
More disturbingly, the idea of academic and civil society freedom to improve government by supplying constructive criticism has retreated significantly since the era of reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. In the latest study on the subject of Chinese civil society, a China-born sociologist argued that when dramatic social calamities such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake occurred, spontaneous social ‘self-help’ efforts mounted by citizens were approved post facto by the government under labels such as ‘nationalism’ and acts of ‘citizenship’ (Xu 2017, pp. 8–28). The Chinese authorities were in fact slow to respond on the ground, prompting local citizens to take matters into their own hands since they were equipped with ‘prior experience of providing social services’ such as purchasing, delivering and distributing food and water; updating rescue information and donation notices online; cooking for survivors; babysitting; and so on (Xu 2017, p. 43). In a clear sign of defensiveness, the official People’s Daily published an editorial two days after the earthquake that compared the relief operations to a ‘great battle’ that ought to occupy the attention of all levels of the Chinese Communist Party. The editorial stressed that disaster relief was ‘first and foremost a political task’ (Xu 2017, p. 44). Once this call to mobilization was explained, saving people’s lives became top priority and the government could be seen to be compassionate to earthquake victims and survivors alike. This is obviously symptomatic of an insecure great power.
In March 2017, a report issued jointly by the Centre for International Media Assistance and the National Endowment for Democracy argued that China has transcended a defensive position associated with its censorship of all domestic media and the formidable Great Internet Firewall. The report noted that ‘without much fanfare, it [China] has turned its focus outward, seeking to take its influence over the information environment global. Through a combination of market-oriented mechanisms, propaganda pressure tactics, and action in international arenas, China is attempting to harness the global information ecosystem in unprecedented ways’ (Kalathil 2017, p. 1). The report highlighted three prongs of this new information manipulation strategy. Firstly, influencing foreign media reporting through Press releases, briefings and other cultivation; secondly, articulating the need for Internet sovereignty at the United Nations (UN) and other world forums; and thirdly, influencing ‘global culture’ into becoming more pro-China through funding and shaping cultural festivals, sports events and engaging Hollywood’s film narratives through instruments of financing, market access and personal influence with film makers (Kalathil 2017, pp. 3, 32). True to expectations, the widely respected journal China Quarterly, published by Cambridge University Press was initially forced in August 2017 by China to excise 315 published papers from its online database hosted in the country. A massive outcry by academics worldwide forced Cambridge University Press to stage a U-turn within days of complying with Beijing’s demands. The Press decided that it was more palatable to defy Chinese censorship than to sacrifice the spirit of academic inquiry. Less successful in resisting Chinese pressure is the Australian publisher Allen and Unwin whose author, Professor Clive Hamilton, alleged in a book ominously titled Silent Invasion that China’s proxies had sought to influence Australia’s democratically elected parliament and political parties through bribes and other illicit measures (Westcott 2017). In June 2019, the so-called ‘extradition law protests’ in Hong Kong revealed that even the foreign business community based in the territory stayed silent on the issues that vexed ordinary Hongkongers out of fear of Beijing’s retaliation against their operations both in Hong Kong and on the mainland. Many speculated that the territory might lose its status as a ‘middle ground’ between China and the business world (Stevenson 2019). This volume studying the BRI echoes the concerns of media theorists, civil society quarters, businesses and academic publishers caught up in the daunting campaign of censorship and silence surrounding Chinese foreign policy ventures abroad.
On the contrary, the ancient Silk Road was a mostly ungoverned and spontaneous transmission belt of knowledge in both eastward and westward directions (Elisseef 2000). Whenever war in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean sought to close off trade with Asian centres between the 1000s and 1200s, itinerant Europeans like the Polo brothers, pilgrims like Ibn Battuta and numerous adventurous Arab merchants pioneered their own pathways to the East. Historian Peter Frankopan noted that until the era of Marco Polo’s sojourn in Mongol-controlled China, the latter’s knowledge of the outside world had been ‘distinctly sketchy and limited’ (Frankopan 2015, p. 185). Subsequently, the famed naval expeditions of the early 1400s led by Admiral Zheng He and his compatriots during the Ming Dynasty represented a high point of ancient Chinese attempts to actively reach out to the rest of the world. Thereafter, it was a return by Chinese dynasties to the comfort of passivity and relative isolation vis-à-vis foreign contact. Therefore, a critical study of the BRI ought to probe at the geopolitical, economic and ideological significance of what the ancient Silk Road meant. In fact, as Frankopan and others have trenchantly argued, there were many Silk Roads on land and via the sea (Frankopan 2015, pp. 1–26). The majority ...