The intertwined geopolitics and geoeconomics of hopes/fears: China’s triple economic bubbles and the ‘One Belt One Road’ imaginary

Abstract

This article adopts a discursive-cum-material approach to China's new 'One Belt One Road' (OBOR) geostrategic imaginary and its development through the intertwining of geopolitics and geoeconomics of hopes and fears. It first contextualizes this development after the 2008 financial crisis when China promoted a vast stimulus package that inflated existing property and infrastructure bubbles and fuelled another in finance. Resulting debates over crisis management enabled an incoming President Xi to articulate a set of hope-based discourses that came to include 'China Dream', 'new normal', and OBOR. Familiar cartographic statecraft techniques and novel spatial metaphors were used to promote OBOR's allegedly 'win-win' strategy discursively. The OBOR imaginary was translated materially, and importantly, into policies that promoted a grand trans-regional 'spatial fix' to postpone China's over-accumulation crises. This strategy is consolidating a China-oriented infrastructural mode of growth in production, financial and security. As this absorbs ever more productive and financial capital, we see the emergence of contradictions, antagonisms, and conflicts, especially in the use of bilateral loan-debt contractuality to appropriate strategic infrastructure. The article concludes with a call for an affective turn examining the intertwining of geoeconomics and geopolitics in the analysis of trans-regional spatial fixes.

China’s spatial fix and ‘debt diplomacy’ in Africa: constraining belt or road to economic transformation?

“…Landlocked Ethiopia received a "lifeline" on rails to the Gulf of Aden, financed through a US$4.2 billion loan from China Exim Bank. In return, Africa's second most populous country was firmly integrated into the BRI and its underlying Chinese-oriented mode of accumulation (see Sum 2019). However, the railway has contributed to the country's growing external debt levels.…”

“…According to the Chinese government, 37 African countries and the African Union committed to the initiative by April 2019 (Dollar 2019, 2). Central to the BRI in Africa remains the continent's integration into trans-regional infrastructure networks and corridors, as part of the new Maritime Silk Road (see Jian 2018;Mayer and Zhang 2020;Sum 2019), which complements the land-based "Belt" through Eurasia. Large-scale projects, such as port developments in Djibouti and Lamu, Kenya, and railway lines in Ethiopia and Kenya, have become BRI "flagship" projects that are expected to boost economic growth and generate widespread prosperity.…”

Societal implications of a changing Arctic Ocean

“…Shipping through the Arctic, as distinct from shipping to and from Arctic destinations, has also attracted great interest, not yet a huge increase in vessel traffic (Staalesen 2020 ), due in part to variable ice conditions that reduce predictability and retain hazards (Pizzolato et al 2016 ). For the longer term, Arctic shipping features prominently in strategies such as China’s One Belt One Road initiative (Sum 2019 ), though no actual Arctic projects have been undertaken thus far.…”

“…Arctic resources and access are behind at least some of these concerns (Kaltenborn et al 2020 ; Spohr and Hamilton 2020 ), as can be seen in two recent and prominent examples. The Polar Silk Road, the northern component of China’s vision for One Belt One Road, includes a spate of infrastructure proposals across northern Eurasia (Sum 2019 ) and entangles economic opportunity through shorter shipping routes with geopolitical aspirations (Su and Huntington 2021 ). The difficulty of distinguishing between the interests of Chinese companies and those of the central government will make it all the harder to tell which is the overriding factor (Klinger and Muldavin 2019 ), at least for those outside of China.…”

Belt and Road and China’s Attempt at Region Building in Central-East and Southeast Europe

“…Jointly, the five dimensions lay the contours of a comprehensive connectivity-based development. All of these connectivities are paradoxically rooted in the ideas of sovereignty, national development, and national “policy rights” to choose an appropriate developmental model (Vangeli, 2018c), while at the same time, they work towards relativising the importance of the national scale of development (Sum, 2019) by proposing various aspects of regional development as – to use Jessop (2013) concepts – vertical integration (with China); horizontal linkages and networks between countries that share similar interests or are portrayed as complementary in the grander scheme of things; transversal linkages that seek to link the special zones, hubs, and nodes; and removing scales by resorting to digitalisation and bringing Belt and Road into space. Taking into account the multiple dimensions and the sheer ambition of the initiative, Qoraboyev and Moldashev (2018) analyse Belt and Road from the perspective of “comprehensive regionalism.” However, as connectivities are to be established and advanced jointly between China and a number of other actors, and often between two or more non-Chinese actors, the region work of the Belt and Road starts with the intensifying and densifying networking interactions around specific policy issues.…”