“Belt and Road” is big. The world's preoccupation with Belt and Road—much like its historic preoccupation with China—is with its size, both real and imagined. Belt and Road is big, but imagination has also given it a material concreteness and strategic coherence that belies the varied negotiations and contingencies that underlie it. This is a key takeaway of The Belt Road and Beyond by Min Ye and Rivers of Iron by David M. Lampton, Selina Ho, and Cheng-Chwee Kuik.
Offering windows on different politics of Chinese infrastructure development, the two books are joined by more than their empirical subject matter. For one, they are distinguished by their common interest in the question: How do critical audiences and agents interpret, respond to, and shape China's infrastructure initiatives and to what effect? As both books highlight, in China, where the center's directives are often ambiguous by design or by necessity, there are plenty of opportunities for domestic, local, and regional actors to put their own stamp on “Chinese” policies.
In answering this question, the two books share an appreciation for the local and historical contexts that condition China's contemporary infrastructure initiatives at home and abroad at both the policymaking and implementation stages. The two books focus on different policy agents and audiences but share an approach that conceptualizes policy and strategy as having been produced by systems of relations composed of actors with varied and overlapping interests. Ye directs attention inward, to the complex mix of national and subnational actors and interests that make up China's state and mixed economy, while Lampton, Ho, and Kuik direct attention to the overlaps and intersections between China and those in Southeast Asia as a critical periphery region beyond China's borders.
Ye's book begins with familiar themes for any student of contemporary Chinese politics: a state faced with crisis involving interdependent domestic, foreign, economic, and political challenges; a fragmented authoritarian system characterized by many power centers and varied domestic actors; and the mobilization of domestic actors in support of strategic directives that are as “ambitious” in their rhetoric as they are “ambiguous” in their detail. From these starting points, the chapters proceed in three parts—“The Theory,” “The Strategies,” and “Subnational Actors”—plotting and tracing China's path to “Belt and Road.” Most directly, Ye traces Belt and Road to earlier policies—specifically, the Western Development Program and China Goes Global, initiatives that notably precede Xi Jinping. As she highlights, the three policies share common drivers (an ideology of nationalist growth) and state policy instruments (party organization, information control, decentralized mobilization). Her “state mobilized globalization” framework firmly situates all three policies within larger and recurrent domestic debates about globalization—its fiscal consequences and interregional tensions, its “contentious politics,” and also as foreign policy and strategy.
Similarly, in Ye's analysis, Belt and Road is not new so much as it is the latest iteration of policies in which China's top leadership has (1) employed globalization in response to a sense of growing economic crisis and political challenge, and (2) had to turn to a nationalist framing to cut through systemic paralysis, creating what Lampton, Ho, and Kuik refer to as “a systemic problem with overcommitment” (p. 77). Part three of Ye's book gives more focused attention to two categories of subnational actors—three cities (Chongqing, Ningbo, and Wenzhou, each representing different economic models and interests) and Chinese companies (private and state-owned)—and their significance not just for policy implementation, but also for “Chinese capitalism” and existing paradigms of political economy.
Ye's study is mostly a domestic story. But that domestic story of development is also one that has capitalized on connections to its neighboring periphery regions, with Southeast Asian regions playing changing roles over the course of China's reform era. Those connections make China's development more than a China story; it is also a story about Southeast Asia's development. Globalization-development strategies, ideologies of nationalist growth, and the importance attached to infrastructure as a developmental catalyst are not limited to China but are also central to Southeast Asian growth strategies. These interdependent national developmental agendas and visions are at the heart of Rivers of Iron by Lampton, Ho, and Kuik, who examine massive efforts to connect southern China and the seven countries in China's Southeast Asian periphery (Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore). The book also includes discussions on Indonesia.
Rivers of Iron's focus is railways. As in Ye's Belt Road and Beyond, the book begins with China's complex mix of national and subnational actors, as well as the considerable debate within China about development and strategy—but Rivers of Iron gives greater attention to questions of geopolitical opportunity, nationalist ambition, and industrial capacity, as well as risk, associated with China's infrastructure building abroad (chapters 2 and 3). This is in contrast with the sense of domestic fiscal crisis, economic distress, and strategic vulnerability that underlies much of Ye's discussion. This contrast may reflect the different developmental processes that the two books are most interested in explaining. Whereas Ye is most concerned about the development of the Chinese state and post–Deng Xiaoping political economy, Lampton, Ho, and Kuik are most interested in China's contemporary development as a regional and global power. Thus, while they similarly trace the roots of China's current infrastructure projects to pre–Xi Jinping periods, they find the historical referents and precursors to China's current railway constructions instead in the “long gestating” “grand visions” of connectivity held by earlier major powers (notably, Britain and France during the late nineteenth century), and in later years, the Asian Development Bank and local actors in Southeast Asia including Malaysia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Indeed, as Lampton, Ho, and Kuik highlight, in this respect, Xi Jinping is the one who jumped on the Southeast Asian train, and not the other way around.
Some of the most interesting discussions take place in the book's middle chapters. This is partly because Lampton, Ho, and Kuik give attention to the strategic agency and calculations of states like Laos and Cambodia that have received less attention even by those studying Southeast Asia and, as a consequence, have been more vulnerable to caricature, especially in international relations discussions. But also, these middle chapters detail variations (large and small) in Southeast Asian responses to a common predicament—a simultaneous sense of anxiety and opportunity—associated with China's initiatives. The question is thus why the range of Southeast Asian responsiveness (from Laos's “receptive embrace” to Vietnam's “limited involvement”) given important commonalities? These middle chapters identify behavioral patterns that reflect state bargaining power determined by geopolitical and locational position, national capacity, and domestic mobilization. They also highlight different ways that Southeast Asian states can draw negotiating power from “weakness.”
The explanation of both Chinese and Southeast Asian policy also highlights interacting sets of negotiations—one between domestic actors (both within China and within individual Southeast Asian states) and the other between Southeast Asian states and China, resulting in “two-level games,” as famously coined by Robert Putnam. In Lampton, Ho, and Kuik's explanation, the sources of elite legitimation and the distribution of political power at the domestic level in Southeast Asian states—more than Chinese behavior (even if not without effect)—often factor largest in determining Southeast Asian states’ responses. As with Ye, their discussion has implications for the coherence and unity of Chinese strategy. If the strategic coherence of “Belt and Road” is complicated by China's own domestic mix of national and subnational actors, Lampton, Ho, and Kuik add that the range of Southeast Asian interests, contexts, and politics additionally challenge any single Chinese approach, even in the same country.
The book also categorizes different hurdles that complicate project implementation (chapter 6). Here, too, Lampton, Ho, and Kuik highlight politics and dynamics that are not so China-centric, but instead quite typical of practically all complex interstate agreements involving large state commitments and many agents; negotiating counterparts with varying capacities to implement policy; and intergovernmental negotiations in which popular or lower government input is often minimal. For these reasons, infrastructure deals, they note, may be especially prone to material delays and political complications.
For those familiar with the work of Rivers of Iron's three authors, they may hear their distinctive voices come through. Lampton is especially heard in the discussions of China's fragmented political system, as well as the running comparison between the development trajectories of the United States and the People's Republic of China as pre-rising and rising powers, their efforts at national integration, and respective state-led “Manhattan Project” efforts at national competitiveness. Ho's voice may be especially heard in discussions on the relational and operational aspects of hierarchical relations, and Kuik's on domestic elite legitimation and the ways that Southeast Asia's policy contradictions can serve strategic purposes.
In short, the two books offer interdependent stories of China in construction: railways and connector links that serve national and regional integration agendas, a Chinese state still recalibrating state-market relations and, more broadly, Asia's changing economic geography. Indeed, there is much to recommend about these two books, both of which offer rich empirical examinations of what is taking place (to quote Min Ye) “beneath the waterline.” There are also distinctive theoretical contributions—Ye to ongoing debates about what both the Chinese state and Chinese political economy look like, and Lampton, Ho, and Kuik to a growing literature on the agency and contingencies created by so-called smaller powers in China's periphery regions. Those teaching will also appreciate that individual chapters offer relatively self-contained discussions while serving a larger story, making it easy to assign for class discussions, for example, on comparative political economy, state development, Chinese foreign policy, comparative Southeast Asian foreign policy, foreign policy of non-major powers, China–Southeast Asia relations, among others.
Most of all, in opening the “black box” of policymaking and revealing the varied actors, varied interests, and varied interpretations that give both form and content to what has come to be known as Belt and Road, both also offer strong corrections to Xi Jinping–centered, as well as China-centric “grand strategy” explanations of China's recent infrastructure initiatives. Neither ignores the critical role played by Xi Jinping, but the books also make clear that he is still one of many actors, even if a very important one. Lastly, underlying both—explicit in Rivers of Iron, implicit in Belt Road—is the question: Does China have the capacity—political, material, domestic, and relational—to make Belt and Road truly the “project of the century”? For both, economic development imperatives feature large as policy imperatives, but they also make clear that the “success” and geopolitical significance of China's current initiatives ultimately rests on a range of political and relational negotiations at home and abroad.
