Just over a decade after the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched, it is perhaps the right time to reflect on such an important and complex phenomenon. The world was initially somewhat slow to pick up on the BRI’s importance and the impact it was about to exert globally – the initiative was often dismissed in its early years by both policy-makers and scholars as “too vague” or as “an empty shell,” and therefore unworthy of being given serious attention. However, as the portfolio of BRI-labelled projects and activities frenetically grew, so too did the number of studies of it. By the early 2020s academics generated a seemingly infinite number of articles and books dissecting the BRI from within various disciplines and through an exceptionally rich and diverse array of theoretical and methodological approaches.
Today we seem to have come full circle – the BRI is now widely understood as something of a shadow of its former self, if not outright dead, its momentum apparently lost due to a confluence of reasons. Not only did COVID-19 interrupt the expansion of China’s relations with the world, but China has been widely perceived to have recently turned inward as it seems to be primarily interested in boosting its domestic economy at a critical juncture for its growth and development. Moreover, geopolitical tensions, as well as a growing number of instances of local-level societal or elite pushback against the initiative due to the perceived mismanagement of BRI projects and the fears of overdependence on China seem to have resulted in the reconfiguration of the BRI. Nowadays, “small is beautiful” serves as the BRI’s motto, in contrast to the emphasis on transformative potential of capital projects and large-scale infrastructure building which previously kept the flag high for the BRI. All this is taken as evidence of the dwindling relevance of the BRI for both China and the world.
Any new book on the BRI therefore finds itself in the land of diminishing returns – where the research field is saturated yet interest in the topic seems to be gradually waning. Despite that, through a combination of a productive analytical framework and micro-level analyses the contributors to this volume manage to provide new focal points and intriguing perspectives on the subject.
The editors of the book, Edward Shatz and Rachel Silvey, frame its discussions with two key notions. One, the politics of sight, which the editors explore in the introductory chapter, proves enabling and empowering for pursuing multiple lines of inquiry into the subject. The question of what one sees in the BRI, that is, of what is intentionally brought to light and what is deliberately hidden, not just by the principal force behind the BRI – China – but in the broader context of interactions and engagements of the various social and political forces involved in it, opens up the space for inquiries of invisible and less discussed aspects of the initiative, which in turn offer stimulating insights and analysis. For example, the chapter by Ding Fei, discussing China’s expatriates, their personal histories and professional trajectories, sheds light on important social dynamics that few would consider in the context of the BRI. These, however, provide fertile ground for considering a range of questions concerning not just the international aspects of the BRI but also broader social dynamics in China. The discussion in the chapters focusing on cartographic representations of the BRI (by Galen Murton) and the visual politics of a major BRI/Silk Road-related exhibition (by Marina Kaneti) respectively offer fresh vantage points for reflecting on the power relations and world ordering that are constitutive of, as much as evolving through, the interactions between China and others under the BRI framework. Here, the second key notion of the book – “downstream,” around which the editors build the concluding chapter – provides another useful analytical lens. Using river flow as a metaphor, the editors propose to understand the BRI and its impacts and implications as the downstream effects of a river flow whereby the power and direction of the water is altered by the environmental configurations and contingencies it encounters on the way.
These framing notions are thoroughly applicable and productive, enabling the book to contribute to the growing body of literature exploring the messy evolution of China’s foreign policy in and beyond the “BRI era.” They show how the very content and outcomes of China’s BRI and its foreign policy and engagements are dependent on various domestic and external actors and forces and the contexts within which they interact.
Overall, the book is at its best where it sets its sights on the micro-manifestations of the BRI in ways that open a view toward much broader, and in some instances rarely discussed, facets and implications. Paradoxically, this is not just a strength of the book’s approach but also a limitation. While guided by a unifying analytical framework, the individual chapters stand far apart from each other in their approaches to their topics, so that one struggles to see how cumulatively they form more than a collection of insightful perspectives on selected issues in selected places at selected times relevant to the BRI. In that sense, amidst all the variety and richness of its analyses the ultimate contributions of the book fittingly seem to remain as elusive and hard to conclusively pin down as the BRI’s own contributions to China and the world.
