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Journal Article•DOI•

Theorizing China-world integration: sociospatial reconfigurations and the modern silk roads

Maximilian Mayer1, Xin Zhang2•
The University of Nottingham Ningbo China1, East China Normal University2
04 Jul 2021-Review of International Political Economy (Informa UK Limited)-Vol. 28, Iss: 4, pp 974-1003
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop a spatial perspective to examine the nature of China's transnational influence, focusing on the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for international relations.
Abstract: This paper develops a spatial perspective to examine the nature of China’s transnational influence, focusing on the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for international relations. D...

Summary (4 min read)

Jump to: [Introduction] – [The BRI and global processes of restructuring space] – [They] – [A framework of sociospatial reconfiguration] – [Scales of China-World relations] – [Mapping the BRI's territory] – [Coproducing BRI places] – [Knowledge production for a global China] – [Corridors as a spatial formation] – [Spatial state reconfiguration via corridorization] – [The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] and [Conclusion]

Introduction

  • Instead, the role of space and scale for territorial organization, it seems, are newly imagined and reshaped in the context of the BRI across various regions.
  • A detailed look at China's economic statecraft generates critical insights into how China integrates with the rest of the world economically and politically and adds to the burgeoning scholarly interest in theorizing space making and forms of reterritorialization and rescaling across a variety of disciplinary fields.

The BRI and global processes of restructuring space

  • First proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, and sketched out in subsequent speeches and policy documents, the BRI's two components -coined 'Silk Road Economic Belt' and '21st Century Maritime Silk Road'form an organic approach aimed at reaching greater infrastructural and economic integration along the routes which link East Asia with Western Europe (National Development and Reform Commission, 2015) .
  • With an unusually grand scope and ambition, the Chinese government's ultimate goal is to connect East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East and East Africa into a larger coordinated economic space.
  • The claim that China wants to form a 'neo-tributary' system runs against the complex and fractured cultural, security and institutional settings of local and regional infrastructure politics (Ford, 2010; Pan and Lo, 2017) .
  • Similarly, even though the BRI is animated by Beijing's push for a multipolar world order, its spatial dimensions cannot be reduced to a great chessboard where China counters the U.S. to break free from U.S.-led encirclement (Andornino, 2017; Overholt, 2015) .
  • Finally, the Chinese elites are relative newcomers to the 'Eurasian moment'.

They

  • Opted for an open-ended approach that responds to and tries to coopt conflicting geographical imaginaries and histories of connectedness among political and economic elites across the Eurasian landmass (Kaczmarski, 2017; Mayer, 2018b) .
  • The geoeconomic literature, instead of reducing the BRI to a grand design for achieving mastery over Asia, situates the initiative in the context of economic globalization and China's market integration (Breslin, 2013; Dent, 2016) .
  • As Chinese outbound investments grew rapidly, her trade and investment policies increased the regional gravity of China's market economy (Yeh, 2016) .
  • Due to its capacity to allocate tax revenues and mobilize debtfinanced forms of investment as well as its regulatory control over the distinctive spatial configurations within which such investments are mobilized (Lefebvre, 1978, p. 238) .
  • Furthermore, the infrastructure design, planning and investment by Chinese companies, physically connecting China's western provinces as well as metropolises with other regions and localities, remain conditioned by local and transnational processes that reshuffle the territorial and scalar constellations of economies, societies and administrations.

A framework of sociospatial reconfiguration

  • To examine the ways in which BRI projects influence spatial configurations requires a fine-grained conceptual framework.
  • Building on the insights from a growing body of literature that analyzes the strategies, politics and (re)productions of space and scale (Bachmann, 2016; Brenner and Elden, 2009; Bulkeley, 2005; Jessop et al., 2008) , the authors follow the comprehensive heuristic suggested by Jessop et al. (2008) .
  • It addresses the evolving scalar organization of political-economic life in which the link between state, territory, economy, and sovereignty are socially and politically reproduced and periodically reconfigured (Brenner et al., 2003; Elden, 2009; Steinberg, 2001; Strandsbjerg, 2010; Thrift, 1996) .
  • On the one hand, capital strives to 'annihilate space through time' in its insatiable drive to expand and accumulate surplus value (Marx, 1973, p. 539) through overcoming all geographical barriers to its circulation process.
  • Hence, the authors explore the production of places as a consequence of rescaling territorial administrative practices and the reconfiguration-via infrastructure-of various places outside and inside of China into a network, in an attempt to create novel spatial relationships not only within the state unit but also across, between, and through territorial boundaries.

Scales of China-World relations

  • The ever-expanding scale contained in the BRI suggests new ways in which China structures its self-position vis-à -vis the world and through which scalar configurations China relates to the world.
  • Like other pre-modern empires, in its transition from empire to nation-state, China experienced an uneasy shift from pre-modern unbounded understandings of space and territory to bounded understandings of space and territory in the early twentieth century (Callahan, 2009) .
  • A leading Chinese scholar on the New Silk Road presents the BRI as a fresh approach that 'signals China's active involvement in building a new trend of globalization, rather than only looking for opportunities to seek profits from it.
  • Among Chinese academic and media circles, an un-official list of '65 countries along the Belt and Road' (yidayilu yanxianguo) has started to circulate after the 2015 'Vision and Actions' plan of BRI was released (Xinhua, 2017) .
  • Such expanding scale of geographic coverage of the BRI further illustrates the open, flexible, but also vague nature of the spatial vision underlying the BRI, which may go even beyond the Euro-Asian continent.

Mapping the BRI's territory

  • The maps that visualize the rhetoric of connectivity and connected dreams in BRI indicate a new spatial order.
  • And fixed boundaries as the key defining features of the interstate system are downplayed (Narins and Agnew, 2019) .
  • Thus, the BRI territorial vision and spatial representation of the world challenges the long-held view about ancient Chinese self-understanding of their place in the world: China is not presented in these maps as the center of the world.
  • At the same time, the boundaries and edges of these maps invoke-explicitly and implicitly-a Euro-Asia that is independent or cut off from its transatlantic and transpacific relations.

Coproducing BRI places

  • As projects such as ports, dams, roads, railways and industrial zones materialize, many places will be inevitably transformed.
  • Through 'coordination' or 'docking' (duijie in Chinese) and the expansion of regions covered by the BRI, the alleged 'peripheral' regions and countries can all become regional centers in their own way (Zeng, 2015; H. Wang, 2016) .
  • The influential report emphasizes the BRI's potential to reconfigure China's own regional development strategy to make use of 'full scale, all directional opening-up' as a way to facilitate comprehensive development of all major regions within China (China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, 2015).
  • It was subsequently represented by the 'three economic belts' policy (sanda jingji didai) formulated in the Seventh Five-year Plan (1986 Plan ( -1990)) .
  • 'The transformation of world economic and trade framework and the ebb and flow of big power without exception all takes reconfiguration of domestic structures to handle the changes in the external situations, also known as The above-mentioned report reads.

Knowledge production for a global China

  • The Chinese state mobilizes its resources to actively promote specific knowledge and expertise that shapes and spreads the increasingly expanding scale of Chinese activities around the world.
  • Overall, these centers provide comprehensive coverage of countries and regions around the world, including regions not geographically contiguous with China, such as Canada, Oceania, South Africa, Latin America, and the Arabic World.
  • In the document, the Depart of Social Sciences of the MOE specifically stipulates the main goal for this plan is to 'provide intellectual support and talent guarantee for the reform projects of the state' (Ministry of Education, 2015) .
  • In 2017, a different department (Depart of International Cooperation and Exchanges) of the MOE launched another round of institutional building specifically in the field of country and area studies, opening up registration of university-based centers for country and area studies.
  • Through collective remapping Eurasia and the state-led construction of a globally oriented knowledge base to support the spatial expansion of China's foreign policy, China has presented a voice, for the first time in its modern history, to establish a global theme.

Corridors as a spatial formation

  • Corridors have become the key spatial idea driving development policies and investments in infrastructure globally.
  • Large-scale infrastructure projects such as railways, highways, dams, ports and regional power grids underpin comprehensive territorial development plans geared toward extracting resources, producing commodities, and moving goods to manufacturing facilities and finally to market' (Schindler and Kanai, 2019, p.1) .
  • The making of corridors should be defined as a sociospatial process-a 'spatial economic build-up … defined as sub-regional economic cooperation mechanism that organically integrates production, investment, trade and infrastructural construction into one body within specific trans-national regional scale' (Liu and Lu, 2017, p.1) .
  • Chinese researchers generally assume that economic corridors develop through four stages.
  • The second stage moves to urbanization and the revival of rural and urban infrastructure to facilitate industrialization and improve the investment environment for small-and-medium sized enterprises while enhancing investment in infrastructure for tourism and other sectors.

Spatial state reconfiguration via corridorization

  • The idea of building corridors as a scalar fix shares affinity with other spatial strategies used in China.
  • According to Ong, the concept of 'Greater China', popular since the 1980s, consists of special economic and administrative zones that were aimed at integrating adjacent areas including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao economically and politically (Ong, 2004, p.71 ).
  • It becomes clear from this detour that the implementation of BRI projects follows a timetested range of state spatiality.
  • Meanwhile, broadly similar forms of corridorization are strongly pushed outside of the BRI too.
  • Partly set as projects competing with the BRI, Japan and India have envisioned similar corridors (e.g. the Asia Africa Growth Corridor) as joint international development projects across South Asia up to East Africa (The Research and Information System for Developing Countries, 2017).

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

  • Through northern Pakistan and into China's western provinces, thereby connecting China's landlocked Xinjiang with the port of Gwardar in Pakistan's Balochistan province.
  • In short, the amount of CPEC-related infrastructure investments equal more than a third of Pakistan's annual GDP in 2016 (World Bank, 2017) .
  • The military, which traditionally occupies a independent role in Pakistan, has become increasingly active throughout the CPEC spaces, adding to the economic burden and institutional messiness on the ground (Hussain, 2017 ).
  • In addition, sociospatial reconfiguration via BRI corridors now includes attempts to connect non-adjacent regions.
  • The traditional subnational region-to-region collaboration between China and Russia has been heavily concentrated in the collaboration between Northeast China and the Russian Far East, two regions across the Sino-Russian borders.

Conclusion

  • This article analyzes China's recent economic statecraft through the lens of sociospatial reconfigurations.
  • The authors build on the "TPSN" framework in order to theorize how China's integration with the world reshapes the spatiality of global and regional connectivity and how the dominant physical and ideational spatial form of BRI investmentsthe corridorreconfigures state spatiality.
  • The BRI's heterogeneity and manifold local agency contradicts assumptions that foreground the grand schemes of geopolitics.
  • The differences between corridors are not conceptualized.

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Theorizing China-World Integration:
Sociospatial Reconfigurations and the
Modern Silk Roads
Maximilian Mayer and Xin Zhang
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Nottingham
Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo, 315100, Zhejiang, China.
First published 2020
This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The work is licenced to the University of Nottingham Ningbo China
under the Global University Publication Licence:
https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/library/documents/research-
support/global-university-publications-licence.pdf
Theorizing China-World Integration: Sociospatial Reconfigurations and
the Modern Silk Roads
Maximilian Mayer and Xin Zhang
Maximilian Mayer, School of International Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo
China, maximilian.mayer@nottingham.edu.cn
Xin Zhang, School of Advanced International and Area Studies, East China Normal
University, xzhang@saias.ecnu.edu.cn
1
Abstract
This paper develops a spatial perspective to examine the nature of China’s
transnational influence, focusing on the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
for international relations. Drawing upon political economy, regional studies and critical
geopolitics, we argue that the most interesting puzzle concerning the BRI pertains to the
ongoing reconfigurations of political space. Contemporary sociospatial reconfigurations as
analyzed through a multidimensional framework offer key insights into the operations and
the extent of China’s growing global power in general and with respect to the BRI in
particular. We draw on a broad range of materials such as maps, Chinese academic and
policy discourse as well as observations about corridor projects to theorize a) how the
spatiality of global and regional connectivity is reconfigured through the process of
China’s integration with the world; and b) how corridorization as a dominant physical and
ideational process shapes Chinese investment projects and reconfigures state spatiality
along the BRI. The results indicate that the main territorial pattern is not the nation or the
region but the corridor. Furthermore, expansionist and unidirectional stories of China’s
growing power overlook the local encounters and negotiations necessary for infrastructure
projects to succeed. In addition, China’s economic statecraft is contextualized within the
ongoing post-financial crisis political-economic restructuring of territories, places, and
scales within the global capitalist system.
Keywords: territorial rescaling, sociospatial structuration, Belt and Road Initiative, China,
corridor, Euro-Asia
2
Introduction
With over a $1 trillion US dollar in promised investment and large-scale construction
projects, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has inspired a wealth of observations, research
and disciplinary thinking about spatiality and space making (Jessop and Sum, 2018; Kuus,
2019; Narins and Agnew, 2019).
1
Various popular interpretations of the BRI suggest
crucial spatial implications either on a continental, regional or local scale. Geocultural,
geoeconomic and geopolitical approaches to the BRI highlight how various formations of
space underpinning political order are undergoing reconstruction as China is intensifying
its relations with the rest of the world (Agnew, 2012; Ferdinand, 2016; Flint and Zhu
2019; Lin et al., 2019; Summers, 2016). Presumptions of larger-than-life investments
clash with the realities of actual infrastructure projects, spurring heated debates about
China’s hegemonic ambitions and its alleged neocolonial approach (Blanchard and Flint,
2017; Nordin and Weissmann, 2018). Yet, a closer look at how Chinese infrastructure
projects really affect the territorial configurations of states and economies on the ground
leads to a more sober and nuanced understanding of the effects and limits of China’s
influence.
Exploring contemporary sociospatial reconfigurations offers key insights into the
operations and extent of China’s growing global power in general and the BRI in
particular. Domestically, the reform and opening policy of the Chinese government has
1
We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of RIPE for their helpful comments.
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at workshops at the University Nottingham
Ningbo China and the National University of Singapore where we got invaluable feedback from
participants. Thanks to Lewis Sanders for a helping hand with the language of this piece.
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  • ..., and Agnew, J. (2019). Missing from the Map: Chinese Exceptionalism, Sovereignty Regimes and the Belt Road Initiative. Geopolitics. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2019.1601082 The Nation (2016, August 29). CPEC “game-changer” for Pakistan, ‘fate-changer’ for region: PM. Retrieved from https://nation.com.pk/29-Aug-2016/cpec-gamechanger-for-pakistan-fate-changer-for-region-pm. Neilson, B. (2014). Zones: beyond the logic of exception? Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 40 (2), 11-28. The New Indian Express (2017, May 13). China to invest $50 billion to develop Indus River Cascade: Report. Retrieved from http://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2017/may/13/china-to-invest50-billion-to-develop-indus-rivercascade-report-1604407.html. The News (2017, January 19). China Rebuts Modi Criticism of CPEC. Retrieved from https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/180272-China-rebuts-Modi-criticism-ofCPEC. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial Formations. London: Sage. OECD (2016). Foreign Direct Investment Statistics: Data, Analysis and Forecasts 2016. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/corporate/mne/statistics.htm. Olds, K., & Yeung, H. W.-C. (1999). (Re) shaping ‘Chinese’ business networks in a globalising era. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17(5), 535-555. Ong, A. (2004). The Chinese Axis: zoning technologies and variegated sovereignty. Journal of East Asian Studies, 4 (1), 69-96. Overholt, W. H. (2015). Posture Problems Undermining One Belt, One Road and the US Pivot. Global Asia, 10 (3), 16-21. Page, J. (2014, November 9). China Sees Itself at Center of New Asian Order. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-traderoutes-center-it-on-geopolitical-map-1415559290. Pan, S. Y., and Lo, J. T.-Y. (2017). Re-conceptualizing China’s rise as a global power: a neo-tributary perspective....

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  • ...Hence, while territory is not a fixed container naturally identical with the borders of national jurisdictions, space is seen as ‘an outcome of territoriality, a human behavior or strategy’ (Elden, 2010, p.756; see also Agnew, 1994)....

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Journal Article•DOI•
The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms and results

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Michael Mann
01 Nov 1984-Archives Europeennes De Sociologie
TL;DR: In this article, the authors specify the origins, mechanisms and results of the autonomous power which the state possesses in relation to the major power groups of "civil society" and argue that state autonomy, of both despotic and infrastructural forms, flows principally from the state's unique ability to provide a territorially centralised form of organization.
Abstract: This essay tries to specify the origins, mechanisms and results of the autonomous power which the state possesses in relation to the major power groupings of ‘civil society’. The argument is couched generally, but it derives from a large, ongoing empirical research project into the development of power in human societies. At the moment, my generalisations are bolder about agrarian societies; concerning industrial societies I will be more tentative. I define the state and then pursue the implications of that definition. I discuss two essential parts of the definition, centrality and territoriality, in relation to two types of state power, termed here despotic and infrastructural power. I argue that state autonomy, of both despotic and infrastructural forms, flows principally from the state's unique ability to provide a territorially-centralised form of organization.

1,691 citations

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Frequently Asked Questions (16)
Q1. What are the contributions in "Theorizing china-world integration: sociospatial reconfigurations and the modern silk roads" ?

For instance, this paper examined the role of space and scale for territorial organization in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative ( BRI ) across various regions. 

To encourage further comparative and historical work the authors draw on Philip Steinberg ’ s work on maritime space to suggest that corridors belong to a new archetype instrumental to the sociospatial restructuring dynamics that underpin the BRI and beyond ( Steinberg, 2001, pp. 41-67 ). Future studies on spatial reconfiguration also need to pay attention to military activities as well as digital infrastructures that increasingly undergird the geopolitical competition between, among others, the US, India, Russia and China. Future research should focus on local responses to BRI projects and examine how negotiation processes generate enduring outcomes in the form of changing sociospatial structuration 39 of states and economies. The New Silk Roads: China, The U. S., and the Future of Central Asia. 

The goal of expanding the officially recognized university-based centers for country and area studies is to ‘serve the state strategy and overall situation in foreign policy, fully promote the Belt and Road … 

At the macro-level, shifting geographical imaginaries and presentations of space are a crucial element to understand the reconstruction of space, as new ideas, visions, and plans that affect world politics represent and visualize spatial configuration differently. 

Maps are particularly relevant for the study of spatial imaginations because they are more than scientific representations of ‘reality’: they constitute a symbolic discourse that can mobilize dreams, aspirations, and worldviews (Agnew, 2003, p. 9; Callahan, 2009). 

Ong’s work on variegated types of sovereignty in Asia emphasizes that zoning was central to China’s unique way of reterritorializing state space. 

The BRI includes an array of new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund, which are meant to facilitate the financing of large-scale infrastructure projects (Mayer, 2018a). 

Geographers emphasize that cartographic materials are generative elements in geopolitical processes that redefine the scope, the functions, and boundaries of global territorial space (Harvey, 2001b; O Tuathail et al., 2006; Roberts, Secor, and Sparke, 2003). 

The progressive securitization of critical infrastructure including ports, pipelines and roads tends to increase the instances of domestic borders and exclusion practices in Pakistan (Lim, 2017). 

Chinese investments mostly come in the form of loans backed by sovereignguarantees that place the eventual responsibility of covering all debts related to CPEC projects on Pakistani taxpayers (Aiddata, 2017). 

By the end of252018, the new series of university-based country and area studies centers registered with MOE included more than 400 centers based at more than 100 institutions of higher educations. 

BRI corridors have a regional/transnational scale and require concrete measures of administrative territorial rescaling such as illustrated in the case of the CPEC. 

The military, which traditionally occupies a independent role in Pakistan, hasbecome increasingly active throughout the CPEC spaces, adding to the economic burden and institutional messiness on the ground (Hussain, 2017). 

The concept of ‘corridorization’ grasps a flexible practice of territorial rescaling – not exclusively, yet especially in the context of Chinese foreign infrastructure investments. 

For instance, the claim that China wants to form a ‘neo-tributary’ system runs against the complex and fractured cultural, security and institutional settings of local and regional infrastructure politics (Ford, 2010; Pan and Lo, 2017). 

The resulting reconfiguration of state spatiality through multilayered, multi-scalar arrangements belies the easy division of ‘domestic’ and38‘international’ along traditional national boundaries (Easterling, 2014; Neilson, 2014).