Author: Tom Baxter

Looking at the Belt and Road through the lens of Marxist geography

The Belt and Road is driven by a capitalist logic recognizable to any large economy

By Tom Baxter

In November last year researchers from the Transnational Institute (TNI) wrote a framing paper on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on behalf of the Asia Europe People’s Forum. The paper provided a quite different and refreshing perspective on the BRI, seeing it through the lens of political economy and, in particular, Marxist geographer David Harvey’s theory of the “spatial fix” for economies facing crises of overaccumulation. Steering clear of the noise of proponents’ and opponents’ political sloganeering around the Initiative, the researchers dug into the underlying economic drivers of the Belt and Road. Such an approach is potentially enabling for advocacy groups in that it helps to identify different actors and their motivations within the Initiative and provides new discussion points and perspectives for researchers and anyone else interested in the Belt and Road.

Panda Paw Dragon Claw interviewed the three authors of the framing paper, Stephanie Olinga-Shannon, Mads Barbesgaard and Pietje Vervest, on their critical perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative.

PPDC: Looking at Belt and Road as a whole, many have seen the motivation for the initiative through the lens of geopolitics – China attempting to increase its influence around the world. In your briefing, however, you reject this view in favor of the macro-economic push factors, which you describe as a “capitalist crisis with Chinese characteristics”. Can you tell us more about this reading of the BRI?

TNI: Viewing the BRI through the lens of political economy, rather than geopolitics, a different picture emerges. Rather than a ‘grand strategy’, we see the BRI as a broad and loosely governed framework of activities seeking to address a crisis in Chinese capitalism. Under the capitalist mode of production, crises routinely emerge and – as argued by geographer David Harvey – an indicator of such crises is the “overaccumulation of capital”. This overaccumulation can be defined as: “some combination of surplus capital looking for productive investment, surplus commodities looking for buyers, and surplus labor power looking for productive employment”. This then requires some sort of fix. As Harvey argues, such fixes are discernible throughout the history of capitalist development. For example, Britain’s export of surplus capital and labor in the nineteenth century to the United States, Australia, Argentina and South Africa. Or more recently, the export of surplus capital from Japan in the 1960s, South Korea in the 1970s and Taiwan in the 1980s. Significant parts of the export from the latter three in fact went to China and helped build up productive capacity there. In the framing paper, we argue that the BRI needs to be seen in the context of such fixes that have also been taking place in China to solve moments of “overaccumulation”.

As we try to show, similar activities to those currently happening under the BRI, in fact began in the 1990s in a similar moment of overaccumulation, as Chinese companies began operating abroad, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Thus, in this view, the BRI, like ‘Going Out’ and ‘the Great Western Development Project’ before it, provides a broad framework to incorporate and encourage these activities that seek to provide a solution to overaccumulation.

Almost any activity, implemented by any actor in any place can be included under the BRI framework and branded as a ‘BRI project’. This campaign mobilisation approach to policy making is common in Chinese economic policy. It allows Chinese SOEs and provincial governments to promote their own projects in pursuit of profit and economic growth, while the central Chinese government maintains a semblance of leadership and control over the initiative. Where necessary, the central Chinese government plays a strong politically supportive role, through local embassies, or national ministries or agencies such as the National Energy Administration or the Ministry of Commerce. But at the same time, with such a broad framework, and a multitude of actors involved, the Chinese government has struggled to effectively govern BRI activities.

PPDC: In particular, you talk about BRI as a “spatial fix” to China’s economic woes. Can you explain more about this concept?

TNI: David Harvey explains that when capital, for different reasons, can no longer find profitable outlets, crises characterized by surpluses of money, commodities and industrial capacity emerge, leading to “mass unemployment of labor and an overaccumulation of capital”. Capital is understood here as a process rather than a thing, whereby money is invested into productive labor in order to earn more money. If this process stops, surpluses of capital sitting ‘idle’ – that is, not in process (including money, commodities and machines) – emerge side-by-side with surpluses of labor power (meaning workers, who are unemployed). Under capitalism, such barriers to the process of capital can lead to situations of social unrest. Under globalized capitalism, any and all governments must manage these crises, if they are to remain in power.

David Harvey cover

Such crises are often managed by what Harvey terms a ‘spatial fix’, that is, as Harvey writes in his book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the “absorption of these surpluses through geographical expansion and spatial reorganisation”. The crux of spatial fixes is to provide new opportunities for productively combining capital and labour in pursuit of profit. Spatial fixes can take many forms, such as opening up new markets by breaking down trade and investment barriers or building large-scale infrastructure projects to absorb surpluses while facilitating expansion into new territories. While these spatial fixes have occurred throughout the history of capitalist development, they are necessarily unable to permanently resolve the crisis, they merely delay or relocate it. In the framing paper then, we try to conceptualise the BRI as encapsulating the latest in a series of spatial fixes happening since the 1990s.

PPDC: What do you see as the principal motivations for Chinese companies, in particular SOEs, to invest along the Belt and Road?

TNI: We see profit as the main motive for Chinese companies, including SOEs, to invest abroad. Since reforms to corporatize Chinese SOEs in the 1990s, they have been required to become self-funding and their success is evaluated by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) primarily based on economic targets, including profit. Investments and projects abroad are one of the means through which these SOEs are pursuing profits. This pursuit can take many forms, e.g. from the construction of infrastructure, to hunting for cheaper manufacturing opportunities, to constantly reducing shipping costs in different ways.

We aren’t thinking in terms of ‘along the Belt and Road’, as this assumes one big physical project, but see these as a broad range of investments branded under the BRI framework. Investments have also been branded by their promoters as ‘BRI activities’ in countries that have not signed Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) relating to the BRI.

Branding investments and projects under the BRI provides Chinese companies, especially SOEs, with financing opportunities, political support for projects both from the Chinese government and potentially from the government where the project is located, and the prestige of their project being part of a global initiative.

PPDC: Given that BRI is designed to release the pressure valve on China’s overcapacity industries, many of which are polluting heavy industries, to what extent do you think the Belt and Road can really be “greened”, an intention that was reiterated at last year’s Belt and Road Forum in April?

TNI: ‘Greening’ the BRI will be challenging given the scope of the BRI and its focus on mega infrastructure and mega production. As renewable energy capacity has increased in China, some Chinese companies have developed strong technology and experience in this field. However, the use of this capacity and technology has not necessarily been used in BRI-branded projects outside of China. Furthermore, activists and researchers are increasingly showing there is also a ‘dark side’ to renewables, for example Corporate Europe Observatory’s research on so-called ‘renewable gas’.

The type of energy projects implemented in participating countries also depends on what these governments want. Where there is a demand for coal power and large-scale hydropower, profit-seeking Chinese companies will be keen to fulfil these demands. At the same time, we have seen strong lobbying from Chinese energy companies to promote their projects. In Myanmar, for example, hydropower companies, with the support of the Chinese Embassy in Yangon and the National Energy Administration, have lobbied the national government for the expansion of large-scale hydropower in the country’s north.

We also need to think about what is meant by “green”. In China, large-scale hydropower is viewed as ‘green’ and has been key to the reduction of China’s energy emissions. Large-scale hydropower has, however, had devastating impacts on communities affected. It is important that ‘greening’ the BRI does not mean destroying the lives and livelihoods of those involved.

PPDC: In contrast to placing China’s domestic economic issues as the main drivers of the BRI, you describe the geopolitics of Belt and Road as “a consequence” of the Initiative. Can you tell us a bit more about this perspective?

TNI: We argue the primary drivers of BRI are political-economic. The types of profit and growth driven activities currently being branded under the BRI were implemented long before the BRI was announced. However, the BRI does encourage the building of political and public support for the initiative (BRI priority areas number one and five), and trade and investment on such a mammoth scale is apt to change the economies and relations of many places involved, at both the national and local level. The BRI has already impacted relations between China and participating countries, and between participating and non-participating countries. Japan and the United States, for example, have launched similar initiatives in response to the BRI, in an attempt to prevent their own influence from diminishing.

PPDC: If the geopolitical implications of BRI are a consequence rather than a motivating factor, why do you think the initiative has triggered so much scepticism from Western governments, in particular the US?

TNI: Regardless of the drivers of the BRI, many western governments are viewing the BRI through how it impacts their interests (including the interests of capital emanating from their respective countries). As the BRI is increasing competition and BRI-branded projects are changing the physical landscape and movement of goods, people, resources and energy, this is undoubtedly impacting those interests. However, just because the BRI is perceived to be driven by geopolitics, doesn’t mean that it is.

PPDC: You also explain that China and the BRI are, contrary to more commonly heard interpretations, not trying to overthrow the international order, but rather are proactively engaging with international organisations to create legitimacy for and smooth the path for the initiative. Can you tell us more about how China is doing this and the likely intentions and outcomes?

TNI: In recent years we have seen a significant increase in the Chinese government’s involvement in the UN and other international organisations, including funding, personnel and cooperation. At least 29 international organisations have signed MOUs relating to the BRI, and the Chinese government, for example, is promoting the BRI as a key means to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This builds legitimacy for the BRI and seeks to change the perception of the BRI from a threat, to the BRI as a global and cooperative initiative to promote development. The Chinese government, for example, has also been a key advocate for a UN Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights. Another key moment was President Xi’s 2016 speech to Davos, where he made it clear that the Chinese government was willing to be a champion of free trade, as President Trump espoused more protectionist trade policies. These commitments show that the Chinese government is seeking to play a key and increasingly prominent role in existing international organisations, rather than overthrow them.

A notable exception is the establishment of ‘BRI courts’ for commercial and investor-state dispute arbitration. Here, rather than work within the existing (and flawed) international arbitration system, the Chinese government is establishing their own courts under the People’s Supreme Court. This is likely to create a venue for arbitration that is more in favor of Chinese companies but follows the same model as similar venues in Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong. The Chinese government is, therefore, not overthrowing the existing system, just tweaking it in favor of Chinese actors. We are, therefore, likely to see an international system that increasingly involves and favors Chinese actors, but not an overhaul of this system.

PPDC: Looking at BRI as a “spatial fix” underpinned by economic considerations, what are the most hopeful pathways for better environmental and social governance of the Initiative? 

TNI: Viewing the BRI as a broad and loosely governed framework of many activities, rather than a pre-planned grand strategy, is politically enabling for activists on the ground, in that individual BRI activities (though large) are thereby not so different from other projects that they may have successfully challenged. Rather than being reduced to mere pawns in a larger geopolitical powerplay between governments, people can be mobilized and organized to engage in and/or challenge these activities as they see fit. While still very difficult, it is easier to halt or alter individual activities than an entire grand strategy hence opening up pathways for better environmental and social governance of BRI-branded projects.

Some activists and NGOs have had success halting BRI projects taking a ‘follow the money’ approach. Financiers of BRI branded projects, in some cases, have been willing to review  their financing if the project is shown to be unprofitable or harmful. For example, in March 2019, the Bank of China agreed to review their financing of the Batang Toru hydropower dam in Indonesia following concerns raised by campaigners. The bank has not yet announced the results of their review and the financing for the project remains in doubt. However, activists opposing the dam continue to be threatened and in October 2019 activist Golfrid Siregar died in suspicious circumstances.

Another successful approach has been through litigation in national courts. For example, in Kenya, the deCOALonize campaign won a court case to stop the construction of a BRI-branded coal-fired power plant in Lamu. Their case was based on environmental grounds and the companies’ lack of consultation with affected communities.

Lastly, the Chinese government is sensitive to criticism and does not want to be perceived as an imperial actor. As discussed above, the self-branding nature of BRI activities means that the brand is difficult to control. This presents risks for the Chinese government, who cannot control, and may not even be aware of harmful BRI-branded projects abroad. This sensitivity can also provide an opening for activists and NGOs.

PPDC: Anything else you want to add?

TNI: Chinese investments are often racialized in a way that investments from other countries are not. That is, investments are referred to as ‘Chinese’ or by ‘China’, while investments from other countries are mostly viewed as from a specific company. For example, an international investment by Shell is rarely seen as ‘Dutch’ investment but investment by Shell the company. It is also often assumed that the activities of Chinese SOEs are under the tight control of the central Chinese government, when in reality these enterprises are loosely governed by central or provincial government agencies with limited capacity. As profit-seeking companies, they are, in fact, not innately different from other international companies. It is important that we refer to individual Chinese actors, such as companies and provincial governments, by their names so as not to racialize investments and contribute to anti-Chinese sentiment.

Stephanie Olinga-Shannon researches the Belt and Road Initiative at TNI, with a particular focus on Myanmar. 

Mads Barbesgaard works on agrarian and environmental justice and land and ocean politics at TNI and teaches at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University @Madsbarbesgaard. 

Pietje Vervest is an economic anthropologist coordinating TNI’s economic justice program.

 

 

Dreams and Infrastructure – Common Destiny, the first Belt and Road movie

A BRI-themed documentary movie manifests China’s infrastructure-centric concept of development

Common Destiny, a movie-documentary about the modern Silk Road, tells the story of lives transformed by dreams realised through persistence and the enabling power of infrastructure development. In many ways the movie presents the narrative of China’s materialist theory of development, led by and underpinned by infrastructure, a contrast to Western countries’ current focus on development aid.

Released in China shortly before the October National Day Holidays, the documentary was relatively high budget – in excess of 50 million RMB, according to producer Liang Yan – received some international attention at the Venice Film Festival, but was low audience, garnering only a million RMB in box office sales during its five days of screening in September, according to RFI.

The movie is a picaresque medley of five stories from across Eurasia and Africa. The stories are all real, recreated by amateur actors, in some cases the real life protagonists themselves.

The prominent presence of infrastructure through the movie reflects and participates in the creation of the “promises of infrastructure” that anthropologist Brian Larkin writes about in his key essay on the social meaning of infrastructure. In that essay, Larkin posits that infrastructure projects “are made up of desire as much as concrete or steel”. He also argues that, because they are the sites of such fluid and diverse forces as personal and societal desires and ambitions, infrastructure is “always metaphor.” If that is the case, Common Destiny is, as a film director’s response to the Belt and Road, playing an active role in constructing that metaphor.

Common Destiny
The movie poster for Common Destiny

Five journeys, one destiny

Common Destiny begins in Kenya, with what has, after being retold on a number of WeChat channels, perhaps become the most iconic of the five stories. Grace is a child in rural Kenya whose school lacks an art teacher. Their weekly scheduled art class has been replaced by an English language class, to the frustration of the students. One day whilst stacking shelves in her mother’s village shop, Grace comes across a promotional flyer for a children’s art school in Nairobi tucked away in one of the delivery boxes. It triggers an idea – to go to Nairobi, find this school and ask the teacher to come to her village to teach at the school. But how to get to Nairobi? Well, there is a new high speed train line built by a Chinese company. Grace saves up money for the train ticket and arrives at the school in Nairobi to ask the teacher to come to their village school. The teacher is sceptical, saying he cannot give up his job in the city just to teach at a rural school. No worries, says Grace, there is a high speed train, you can come just one day a week. Infrastructure has compressed space and made the impossible possible, made dreams, with a dose of dogged persistence from Grace, a reality.

The other stories focus on the road trip of Yangyang, a young Chinese artist and writer, and her father’s friend Wu Yinghua, a truck driver and secret photographer, from Guangzhou to Almaty, Kazakhstan; a journey of (re)discovery for Santos, a Spanish traditional paper maker, to a paper making village in Jiangxi province; the persistence of Ghayda, a young Jordanian woman, in finding a job against the headwinds of patriarchal tradition dictating a housewife future (after nearly 20 failed attempts she finds a job in what seems to be a Chinese company); and the dream of a young Uyghur boy Yusuf Jiang in Kashgar to win a basketball scholarship, again against the headwinds of traditional expectations.

A full deck of positive stories then. At the screening, producer Liang Yan made a point of stressing that the film is not backed by government, echoing comments made to The Economist. Beijing Silk Road Media Group, the production company behind the movie, do explicitly state one of their missions as to “enthusiastically respond to the country’s Belt and Road strategy,” however (written in 2015, when the term “strategy” was in use to describe what is now termed “initiative”). Whether or not the film has direct financial or other backing from government then, it seems likely that it set out with an intention to portray a favourable image of Belt and Road. Of course, if it did not, it would hardly get past Beijing’s movie censors anyway.

Regardless of where the money comes from and the propagandistic undertones of the movie, we can still take it seriously as a cultural response to and participation in the Belt and Road. With Belt and Road a dominant topic in Chinese mainstream (especially state) media, it was only be a matter of time before Chinese artists, literary writers or, in this case, film directors turned their attention to the initiative to offer their interpretations of it. Their interpretations are part of the creation of meaning and of the metaphor of the Belt and Road.

Personal Dreams + Infrastructure = A positive future

This is the equation that formulates the main theme of the movie. Grace’s story is the most prominent and obvious example. Infrastructure is also central to the story of Yangyang and Wu Yinghua whose journey of finding themselves – Yangyang finding her creative drive and Wu finding the confidence to become a semi-professional photographer – is written out in allegorical style as they journey across the now-tarmaced silk roads of China from Guangzhou to Xinjiang and on to Kazakhstan. Elements of that story are almost pointedly self reflective of the centrality of infrastructure to the movie. While Yangyang photographs local minority villagers going about their farming business, Wu turns his camera lens to mega-bridge projects spanning the gorges of south west China, lingering on their powerful, transformational forms.

Infrastructure features prominently throughout the movie, the camera sometimes panning slowly across infrastructure panormas. At times it even seems to perform the functions of narrative and plot device, both a scenic backdrop and a character in itself. It would be easy to mock this as a filmic representation of the financially and techno-charged dreams of state-owned enterprises and local governments, but there is, of course, an element of truth to the equation. The rapid development of infrastructure has enabled incredible things to happen in China over the last three decades and perhaps it is only natural that a creative response to the Belt and Road from Chinese film directors would view the initiative through this lens.

In this way, Common Destiny reflects China’s materialist concept of development, which puts infrastructure front and center in the process of development. Build and economic activity will follow, it proposes, a gamble that has met with both successes and failures within China.

The insistence to put infrastructure front and center in its overseas development agenda differs significantly to the shifting focus of Western development aid in the past few decades, which, according to scholars such as Debra Brautigam, has gradually moved away from earlier emphasis on infrastructure and industry. Over the years, Western donors have elevated concepts of basic human needs, “structural adjustment”, governance and democracy in the place of handing out “hardwares” to recipient countries. While infrastructure is not totally excluded from this picture, current Western theories of international development tends to place emphasis on the individual as the unit that, once empowered, will bring about economic progress. In the Marxian language China’s state planners should be familiar with, the Western theory of development proposes to tinker with the superstructure, while China proposes to remake the base.

Crazy about Infrastructure

Perhaps it is also worth pointing out here that, though an obsession with mega infrastructure projects — bigger, taller, longer, faster — might seem somewhat crude to 21st Western sensibilities, the West too had its period of rapid infrastructure development and a similar fetishisation of the structures — New York’s tallest skyscrapers, 19th century England’s gorge-spanning Clifton Suspension Bridge. Since then, however, the role of infrastructure has largely been backgrounded in the West, while in Chinese discourse of both domestic and international development it is clearly very much foregrounded.

Indeed, as the developed world grapples with post-industrial issues, China is very much embracing and celebrating its industrial might that has finally reached a level comparable with established manufacturing powerhouses like Germany and Japan. The sentiment is best manifested by the online term “infrastructure maniac” or “infrastructure devil” (基建狂魔), coined by netizens to refer to their motherland. Under a 2016 question on Zhihu.com (China’s Quora) “Why do people refer to China as an infrastructure-maniac?”, there are more than 1000 answers, many of which are first-person accounts by engineers of impressive infrastructure projects they worked on — bridges built in remote mountainous areas, highways connecting seemingly impossible destinations, and electricity grids providing millions with access to power in a matter of years. In one of the answers, the user simply posted a few pictures and typed “this says it all.” They were pictures of kids playing with mock excavators in an amusement park.

Infrastructure-maniac

The industrialist national psyche has found its way into people’s imagination about China’s involvement overseas. Common Destiny is a manifestation of that development philosophy.

The omitted variables

In the introduction to the edited volume The Promise of Infrastructure, Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand and Akhil Gupta write “new infrastructures are promises made in the present about our future.”

In Common Destiny, the “dreams + infrastructure = development” equation works seamlessly. The question this raises, and one which brings us closer to reality, is what happens when the equation goes wrong? In reality, there are many more variables to that equation — levels of corruption, effectiveness of engagement with local communities, the attainment of a “social license”, the conduct of environmental impact assessments, and more — what in the parlance of investors would be categorised as “risk”.

A failure to take into account the many variables which can make that bright future a reality leads to a breaking of those promises and a betrayal of aspirations, a major reason why infrastructure projects — from the Lamu coal power plant in Kenya to the hydro dams of Indonesia to the Yunnan-Laos high speed rail — are so frequently controversial and politically charged. Common Destiny omits these elements and their consequences from its equation.

But through its storytelling, Common Destiny also (maybe unintentionally) acknowledges a fundamental truth to human development. No matter what you end up building — a bridge, a highway, a power grid — infrastructure is always a means to an end, not an end in itself. Grace’s dream is for her school to have an art teacher. Ghayda, the young Jordanian woman, is trying to break away from suppressing traditions. These are human pursuits that speak to desires and aspirations higher than material satisfaction. Steel and concrete may assist such pursuits, but can never replace or suppress them.

Ironically, non-materialistic values, such as the integrity of one’s cultural heritage or the love for nature, are often brushed aside as irrational or outright anti-development by infrastructure constructors and their interest groups when they get in the way of a project. In that sense, Common Destiny may have provided a window for viewers to reflect on what development is really about — the needs and desires, material and non-material, of communities around the world.

Writing the image of Belt and Road

“Infrastructures are always fantastic as well as technical objects. They are made up of desire as much as concrete or steel,” writes Brian Larkin in his essay on the anthropology of infrastructure. It is this combination of infrastructure as physical, technical object and a location of wishes and desires that Common Destiny tries to spell out, though limiting itself only to positive examples.

As sites of dreams and desires, government-to-people promises and potential abuses, the meaning of both individual infrastructure projects and a mega infrastructure project like Belt and Road as a whole is a process of creation and discourse. That discourse will include a plurality of voices from across the Belt and Road, weighing up such issues as whether or not promises of a better future have been kept or broken.

Common Destiny contributes its voice to the construction of the narrative of infrastructure. But, as in traditional Chinese paintings where blank means as much as strokes, it is in the omissions to the movie’s central equation that we can see the real challenges and controversies facing China’s infrastructure projects overseas.

“Opaque, huge, ill defined, politicized”: Beijing’s foreign press corp grapples with BRI

Beijing foreign correspondents talk about the challenges of reporting the Belt and Road

In July last year this blog published a piece looking at some of the dominant narratives in international media reporting on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the world’s “best known, least understood foreign policy effort.” One year on, we asked the people behind some of those stories, international media correspondents, about their own reflections on the many challenges of reporting BRI and their ideal Belt and Road stories.

The interviews show some common issues that are reflected across the BRI-engaged media, civil society and researcher space, and some obstacles unique to the demands of an international news desk. They also indicate why some of the narratives identified in our article last year have stuck around, seemingly immune to a number of challenges and more nuanced arguments they have faced.

BRIgooglesearch

Ill defined and opaque

One theme highlighted by all the interviewees when we asked about the challenges of reporting the Belt and Road was the continued lack of an agreed, singular definition for the initiative and its lack of transparency.

We noted in our article last year that outlets often take on the task of and struggle to define the BRI. One year on, journalists are still struggling with this issue. From a journalist or investigator’s perspective, digging deeper into BRI issues is also a challenge when the definition – the starting point – is so hard to fix.

As one journalist commented, “are we reporting on Chinese infrastructure deals? On smart cities? On geopolitical rivalries? On industrial overcapacity?” For newsrooms that also raises a question of staffing – should BRI be the domain of political correspondents, economy correspondents, commodities correspondents? Or, indeed, has “Belt and Road” become a catch all notion for China’s foreign relations which in reality are multifaceted and not necessarily as coordinated as the word “initiative” implies?

In addition to this lack of a clear definition, reporting the BRI is also plagued by a lack of access to important information and sources. Journalists noted that some of the key stakeholders in the Belt and Road Initiative steer well clear of media engagement, including key government ministries, the state owned companies who dominate Belt and Road construction projects, and the policy and commercial banks who are providing billions of dollars of financing. Without access to these stakeholders, it is next to impossible to understand their motivations and perspectives, leaving a large part of BRI political dynamics shrouded in opacity, and also ripe for speculation in place of facts.

Lastly, many of the deals themselves lack transparency. While it may be known which companies and banks are involved in individual projects – usually details of project construction contracts are made public on both sides – the exact terms of financing often remain unknown, information which is particularly pertinent to verifying or disproving the “debt trap” theory.

The making of “sticky narratives”

Last year we commented that one of the key narratives defining Belt and Road in the international press was that of “great power rivalry”. This is still a prevalent narrative, increasingly dominated by the notion of the BRI “debt trap”. (Panda Paw recently took a deep dive into the “debt trap” here).

We asked journalists why such narratives stick around, in spite of numerous experts pointing out holes in or weaknesses of the factual basis for some of the key arguments. Their feedback indicated that, firstly, there is a trend in Belt and Road reporting to extrapolate specific stories and case studies into macro-trends, during the process of which the highly politicized and polarized nature of the narratives coming out of Washington DC and Beijing tend to sway their influence. This can be seen for example in the debt trap narrative, which is primarily based off one case study, the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, and a number of reports from critical DC think tanks such as RWR Advisory, as well as the speeches of Trump administration individuals such as John Bolton.

The scale, complexity, opacity and lack of data about the BRI also contributes to the problem, one journalist commented. It means that journalists tasked with writing on “the Belt and Road”, rather than stand alone case studies, become more reliant on others’ interpretations of the initiative.

In the newsroom, a Belt and Road story that ties in with some of the current dominant narratives is often an easier pitch to editors than one that digs into the contradictions and complexities of the initiative and its projects. One journalist commented that the BRI frame has actually made a lot of China foreign relations reporting more complicated because what were once seen as country-to-country deals, which could be written in detail and nuance, are now understood as part of a grand scheme, which lends itself to broad brush stroke reporting.

Another journalist commented that their perspective from Beijing is extremely limiting. As a China correspondent, they are expected to report on BRI, but realistically there is little new reporting one can do on BRI from a Beijing bureau other than on policy announcements or second hand information.

Capacity

A lack of access to voices and perspectives on the ground in Belt and Road countries was also identified as a challenge. Many outlets do not have a strong representation of reporters in Belt and Road countries, and building up contacts with fixers, commentators, local sources is a long game made more difficult by not being physically present. Interestingly, interviewees did not see access to China-based experts as a particular challenge, with one respondent commenting that it actually seems easier to speak to experts on BRI than on other topics within their beat, such as domestic Chinese politics.

For those outlets that do have people on the ground, coordination across bureaus is still not an easy task. Convincing journalists and their editors that a BRI story, macro and grand in its nature, should take priority over their daily beat can be difficulty. Similarly, for those outlets who do not have people on the ground, convincing editors to allow them the time and resources needed for on the ground reporting, substantive investigation and the process of building up contacts is a difficult sell, especially when there are so many immediate issues going on in the daily China news beat.

Dreaming of better Belt and Road reporting

Almost all of the journalists interviewed said their ideal Belt and Road report would involve visiting project sites. Such visits would include getting first hand insight into the different perspectives on the ground – community, project management, etc. – and trying to work out what has been done right and wrong at specific projects. One journalist commented that they would like to track perspectives and understanding of a specific project from both local perspectives and the perspective from Beijing.

Practically speaking, a number of interviewees responded that they are keen to have more access to less politicized data on the Belt and Road, as a means to tackle the issue of the initiative’s opacity. One journalist also commented that a database of Belt and Road experts, commentators and news outlets representing a variety of viewpoints would be a useful tool to overcome some of the challenges.

Reporting on the Belt and Road isn’t easy. Its scale, opacity, the dominance of politicized narratives and its rapid development all present challenges to international news rooms. Our interviews showed, however, that many journalists are keenly aware of these challenges and are actively searching for ways to strengthen their Belt and Road reporting. With the limited space for Chinese media to report in an honest and impactful way on BRI, how international media outlets report on Belt and Road is of critical importance to information on and global understanding of the initiative, both for local readership and for policy and strategy maker audiences in China, BRI countries and the West.

 

Rising China in the eyes of its closest neighbors

What a collection of ethnographic studies about “neighboring China” can tell us about the Belt and Road

by Tom Baxter

At over 22,000 km, China has the world’s longest land border. Lined up along that border are a total of 14 countries, countless local communities and long histories of interaction and isolation, trade and suspicion. The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders (pdf available for download here) is a selection of essays that look at the diverse experiences of living on China’s border from the perspectives of the communities who live with its presence on a daily basis.

From Laos to Nepal, to Mongolia and Vietnam, the regions along China’s long border are too often seen as peripheral, on both sides — the northern highlands of Laos and Vietnam border China’s mountainous Yunnan province, Nepal neighbors the Tibetan plateau. But as China’s economic, political and social presence and engagement across the Asian continent expands, not least via the official encouragement of China’s “going out” policy and the more recent Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the experiences of these border regions are becoming increasingly important in understanding China’s role across the continent. At the same time, it is the communities on both sides of the border who often feel the most direct impacts of the increased interaction being encouraged by Beijing.

In attempting to understand and assess the impact and the on-the-ground reality of the BRI, this year celebrating its sixth birthday, it is important that we acknowledge those communities’ experiences and look at, in the words of the collection’s editors, Martin Saxer and Juan Zhang, the “smaller scale processes of exchange”, which are undergoing rapid change. Through a series of in depth, mostly ethnographic case studies, The Art of Neighbouring is a step in that direction.

The case studies in the book all date from before 2012. That is, from before the Belt and Road Initiative was announced in October 2013. Nonetheless, they reflect the impacts of a trend of China’s increasing presence outside its own borders which holds true both before and after Xi Jinping’s BRI speech in October 2013. Each chapter of the book focuses on a case study from a total of eight of China’s neighboring countries. Running through those geographically disparate case studies are couple of major themes which deserve highlighting.

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Reimagining histories

In a number of the book’s case studies the rapidly increasing interconnectivity with China is not a new phenomenon, but rather a revival of a historical norm. This is particularly evident in the case of Martin Saxer’s ethnographic study in northern Nepal where the trading relationships across a previously porous border was the basis of existence for borderland communities. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the border between China and Nepal became strictly demarcated and regulated. Where trade had once occurred wherever there was a passable valley, it now became limited to just six official border crossings. Before that, highland communities sought their existence as intermediary traders between the arid and harsh Tibetan plateau and the fertile lowlands of Nepal and India. Since the 1970s China’s increasing wealth and the renewed connectivity brought by new roads which link the borderlands to China much more directly and tightly than to Kathmandu revitalized this centuries old norm.

Along with these physically changing realities, local communities have also reimagined their place in the history of China-Nepal relations and understand their current occupations as following in the footsteps of their ancestors as borderland trading communities. “The new roads are primarily conceived of as ways back to what is remembered as prosperous trans-Himalayan exchange,” Saxer writes. In other words, in the eyes of local communities, a rising and more internationally present China is not so much a disruption of the world order, but is facilitating a return to normality after a comparatively brief interlude.

A case study of traders in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan demonstrates a similar historical processes of a border region “under fuzzy sovereign rule” becoming closed borders during the Cold War to re-opening in the last thirty to forty years. Henryk Alff’s study of the traders reveals that they often attempted to rekindle (perceived) historical ethnic allegiances across borders with, for example, Hui Muslims in China. One Dungan trader from Kyrgyzstan states, “some of us had remote kinship ties with places in China where our ancestors originally came from.” In the post-Soviet and rising China period, traders have been able to take advantage of these perceived cross-border common identities to ease deals and partnership. It is another example of regional history re-imagined, which in turn informs how local people comprehend China’s growing presence and interconnectivity on the continent.

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A truck preparing to enter into China at Nepal’s border to Tibet in Rasuwagadhi, image by: Nabin Baral

China as threat / China as opportunity

Which leads on to the second major theme in the book’s case studies. Informed by local history and present day circumstances, communities all along China’s border are divided in their perceptions of China as a threat or an opportunity.

In Saxer’s Nepal case study he provides an example of an embracing attitude towards China’s presence. Moreover, it is a welcoming coming from local communities and a bottom-up approach, rather than via the top-down government initiatives involving state owned companies, banks and political MOUs through which we normally make sense of China’s presence abroad.

In 2010 a former member of Parliament and local to the northern border region of Humla pulled together local business people to form a Road Construction Committee which lobbied Kathmandu to provide funding to build a road through the lesser used Limi valley to China. They were successful and, after securing funding from Kathmandu, also managed to reach agreement with China to temporarily open the border through the valley for sales of diesel for the construction equipment. By the end of the year the first section of the road was complete, and a Chinese delegation even came to attend the inauguration ceremony.

In another example, a study conducted between 2009 and 2012 of Myanmar Muslim communities residing in Ruili in China’s Yunnan province by Renaud Egreteau reveals that to these communities China is seen as a refuge and a sanctuary compared to the situation they face at home. One of his Ruili-dwelling Myanmar interviewees even says “it’s paradise here!”

In contrast, the histories of Cold War suspicion, tension and conflict along China’s Russian and Vietnamese borders do not wash away overnight. Two case studies of these borderlands show that a perception of China as a threat persists through to this day. A Vietnamese border trader interviewed by Juan Zhang in her study of the Lao Cai – Hekou border crossing says, “even now the Chinese are not much better than before…One can never be too careful.”

Within countries there are of course also divided perspectives on China as threat or opportunity. These as yet unsettled perspectives played out in a number of high profile elections in 2018 in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. 2019 is likely to see more of this tension as more politicians, banks, constituents and other interest groups push back on some of the excesses of Chinese projects and work towards establishing national level strategies on how to interact (or how not to interact) with China and the Belt and Road. Elections in India and, in particular, Indonesia this year could display snapshots of this trend.

What can we learn?

The voices and the world views of communities experiencing and engaging in China’s increasing global presence are an important part of the Belt and Road “story” and the rapidly changing on-the-ground reality across Asia. For one, they represent world views that are often overlooked in mainstream coverage of China’s influence abroad and the Belt and Road. While media often seek comment from local communities on their attitudes toward a specific project, it is rare to hear their take on the larger scale shifting reality or on such big questions as whether China is primarily conceived of as a threat or as an opportunity. As narratives on BRI become more and more polarized between the Beijing story and the Washington story or the Brussels story, it is important not to forget the voices of those who are far more directly impacted by the, in some places, transformational, change BRI is bringing.

But these local community voices are not just “color” for media stories. They are also agents in and of themselves. Saxer’s fascinating case study of a local community proactively campaigning for infrastructure connectivity with China is a case in point. The agency of these local communities is also being played out at very local levels, in national elections and in the establishing of recipient country policies and strategies toward the Belt and Road. In a recent article on Euromoney, Djiboutian minister of finance, Ilyas Moussa Dawaleh, stated “we have problems with the current Belt and Road narrative”. His voice may represent that of a recipient country political elite, rather than the grassroots voices explored in The Art of Neighbouring, but it points to the same problem — the current narrative of the Belt and Road too often overlooks the diversity of agency playing out in its growth and development.

The Art of Neighbouring points a way towards a deeper and more complex understanding of China’s growing presence and engagement on the Asian continent and of the dynamics playing out along the Belt and Road. For these reasons it is useful for all of us in the emerging “Belt and Road watcher” community. Even better will be more recent ethnographic studies of local communities’ perspectives on China since the announcement of the Belt and Road in 2013. This watcher, for one, is waiting keenly for that.

Zooming In, Zooming Out: the frames through which Western media see Belt and Road

An awareness of the narrative frames used by Western media to portray BRI can lead to better reporting

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Chinese commentators are starting to take note of international negative coverage of the BRI since the beginning of 2018. (Screenshot from FTChinese.com)

In April this year the China-Africa scholar Deborah Brautigam published an article in the Washington Post which essentially fact checked and myth-busted Western media reporting on China’s role in Africa. It included the debunking of such commonly held assumptions as Chinese companies’ investments and projects not providing jobs or skills to local communities, Chinese banks’ loans as predatory and burdensome, and China as a land-grabbing power, a notion whose implications of colonialism by stealth Brautigam debunks as straight up fake news.

Panda Paw Dragon Claw‘s inaugural article took a look at how some of China’s more independent media outlets — Caixin and Caijing — are interpreting and writing about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China’s growing involvement abroad. Not surprisingly, that deep dive found certain firmly-rooted perspectives, biases and blind spots in the outlets’ reporting of China abroad, all of which are contributing to shaping the dominant narrative of China’s engagement overseas in the eyes of their audiences.

Western media outlets are no different. Approaching the topic with their own world views and their own needs to satisfy the desires of their readers (customers), Western media are also engaged in the construction of narratives around what Jonathan Hillman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has called “the best known, least understood foreign policy effort” of the 21st century. And as Professor Brautigam pointed out, some of Western media’s blind spots and assumptions can lead to pure factual inaccuracy — anathema to any journalist worth their salt.

More often, however, these perspectives present the Belt and Road through a certain framing, which is neither correct nor incorrect, but does have significant bearing on how the often mysterious initiative is understood in the eyes of readers.

As the construction of something approaching a common, global understanding of Belt and Road is underway, it is worth reflecting, analysing and, where appropriate, critiquing these frames. While some framing of stories is inevitable in order to make sense of the enormous, nebulous and often opaque initiative, an awareness of these frames, their strengths and their blind spots can lead to better coverage and a more complex understanding of China’s overseas involvement. This in turn, we hope, could lead to increased and more effective engagement with the initiative from those who stand to gain or lose the most – local communities and their civil society partners.

So what are the major frames through which major Western media outlets are looking at the Belt and Road? Below are three major framings identified from a read through of BRI coverage from Reuters, the New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg and the Economist. This analysis is not exhaustive, but has attempted to be broad in its sources and aims to be a starting point for broader discussion.

Great Power Rivalry

In response to China’s increasing global clout, Western governments’ perspectives have included the hawkish and the more softly, softly approach. While one perspective sought to absorb China into the global order as a new “responsible global player”, another, knee-jerk, reaction has been to label China a neo-imperialist and expansionist power. Hillary Clinton has even used the phrase “neo-colonialism” in response to China’s increasing presence in Africa.

Media have not been immune from the influence of aspects of the latter of these perspectives. One of the major lenses through which Western media covers Belt and Road is that of geopolitical rivalry. BRI is commonly explained as in direct competition to the post-WWII order, and much coverage of BRI in Asia and Africa has directly pitted US influence against Chinese influence, a binary in which, like a weighing scale, more on one side necessarily equals less on the other.

This framing is evident, for example, in the New York Times’ warm up piece to the first Belt and Road Summit in Beijing in May 2017. The authors of the article attempt to define the Belt and Road — no easy task — and focus on its direct challenge to the West, one which, in their view, comes right from the top, President Xi Jinping himself. “Mr. Xi is aiming to use China’s wealth and industrial know-how to create a new kind of globalization that will dispense with the rules of the aging Western-dominated institutions,” the authors write. The article also directly compares BRI to the US’s post-WWII Marshall Plan, which served the dual functions of post-war reconstruction and the fundamental reshaping the global economic and political order in the US’s interest.

The New York Times also assert that, with infrastructure projects the key component of the geopolitical strategy, even unprofitable and risky projects are, at the end of the day, worth investing in as, for Beijing, politically strategic gains trump concerns over profitability. The case of the US$ 6 billion trans-south east Asia railway project beginning its construction in Laos is cited as an example. According to the New York Times’ interpretation, despite major concerns in regards to Laos’s ability to afford their share of the price tag and a feasibility study that estimated the rail line will remain loss-making for at least 11 years, Beijing is nonetheless willing to push ahead with the project as Laos is a central part of China’s plan “to chip away at American influence in south east Asia.”

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The Economist pits BRI against the Marshall Plan, March 2018. (Screenshot from The Economist)

The Economist adopted a similar BRI versus post-WWII global order framing in the March 2018 article titled ‘Will China’s Belt and Road Initiative outdo the Marshall Plan’. While similar geopolitical concerns have been raised by numerous media in regards to China’s port investments in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, whose purported solely civilian usage has met with scepticism.

While there is nothing explicitly wrong about viewing BRI through this geopolitical rivalry lens, it can be limiting. It often underplays or disregards the role of ‘recipient’ countries and tends to overlook the multiplicity of roles from China’s side, wrapping the actions and incentives of ministries, banks, state owned enterprises and other players under the broad banner of “China”, or even going one step further and portraying it all under the name of Xi Jinping. This can lead to a broad brush approach to the multiplicity of incentives and intentions, which often lurk deeply shrouded in opaqueness.

One major exception to this is the New York Times’ recent investigation into the handing over of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port to China on a 99 year lease. The article broadly takes the geopolitical framing as its reference, but digs deep into the multiple players and stakeholders involved to show a far more complex face of a BRI project than is commonly seen in the media.

The geopolitical frame can also elevate politics above other driving factors of BRI, such as Chinese companies’ rush to find new markets as they face overcapacity at home and the threat of a domestic economy slowly but surely transitioning away from the heavy industries of the 8+% growth era of previous decades.

Most likely almost all BRI projects see an overlapping of all these elements – macro-level geopolitical moves, local level political agency, the push force of China’s economic transition, and more. How to account for and tell a story which can encompass all these elements is a question journalists and researchers may want to ask. No one frame is necessarily more correct than the other, but one frame more often that not leads to the telling of only one part of the story’s whole.

International Development… with Chinese characteristics

Whereas the above lens generates much suspicion, when Western media look at the development impacts of China’s investments, a more ambivalent tone is to be found. There are two main reasons for this. One is that, once key projects take off, they often do have radical and tangible impacts in those recipient countries. Secondly, if part of what China is doing with Belt and Road is spreading its theory and practice of development to other parts of the world, given China’s impressive track record on development, this can hardly be dismissed outright.

As James Milward, a historian at Georgetown University, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in May this year, “China’s economic progress over the past century has been phenomenal, lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. So when the Chinese government offers to share its experience in development … it should be taken seriously.” And few could dispute this.

Milward goes on to cite concerns in the current trend of this sharing of development experience – the debt burden on Sri Lanka which culminated in Sri Lanka’s leasing of the deep water Hambantota port to China for 99 years, for example. But other scholars take a very different view. Professor Brautigam, mentioned at the start of this article, for one, takes a more optimistic, or at least open, view of the benefits Chinese investment can leave behind in recipient countries. In her Washington Post opinion piece, for example, she writes: “Chinese loans are powering Africa, and Chinese firms are creating jobs… China may boost Africa’s economic transformation, or they may get it wrong — just as American development efforts often go awry.” The benefits should not be overlooked, and the jury should remain out.

When focusing on the development frame, news reports have also noted the benefits Chinese investment has and can bring. Bloomberg, for example, put together a list of the projects that will have the most direct positive economic impacts, including the Gwadar port in Pakistan, the  Kyaukpyu to Kunming oil pipeline, running from Myanmar to China’s most south westerly province, Pakistan’s Thar coal mines, and the very same south east Asia rail link the New York Times called out as representative of the geopolitical gaming of Belt and Road.

While many (including myself) would not necessarily view the above list and its strong fossil fuel representation so positively,the point Bloomberg makes about the projects’ large and tangible impact, especially on economic indicators such as GDP, cannot be denied.

Big picture and local voices

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Protest against Lamu coal power plant, Kenya, November 2015. Photo: Maarufu Mohamed/Standard via Sourcewatch

While many outlets have published articles attempting to encompass and report the entire Belt and Road – grand, macro picture sweeps such as the Guardian‘s ‘The $900 billion question‘ and Bloomberg‘s ‘China’s Silk Road’, for example – Western media’s reporting strength on the BRI has often been in local level case studies. These stories aim to act as miniatures of the larger Belt and Road story. Taking a leaf from the journalism 101 book, they tend to focus on points of conflict and disagreement, and in doing so are key mediums for amplifying the often underheard voices and concerns of local communities.

Reuters‘ 2017 in depth report on local opposition to the Petrochina-operated crude oil pipeline in Myanmar is a case in point. It leads into the story from the perspective of one of hundreds of local fishermen who have been ordered to cease all fishing activities and goes on to focus on the lack of consultation with local communities.

“Chinese companies said they would develop our village and improve our livelihoods, but it turned out we are suffering every day,” said Nyein Aye, the local fisherman interviewed by Reuters.

From another continent, the New York Times‘ report on the controversial Lamu coal plant on Kenya’s coast performs a similar function of amplifying and contextualising a variety of local voices, including the ambivalence of one young man: “If it comes with a job I’m ready to take it”. Local opinions can come in all shapes and forms, and international media is one powerful channel through which those different opinions can be expressed to the world.

These articles’ focus on human stories and the conflicts and tensions between big business interest and local communities in some senses help to fill a gap too often seen in China’s domestic coverage — that of on-the-ground coverage from grass roots perspectives, as noted in this blog’s opening article.

Disconnect

Perhaps what is most striking from all the above, however, is the apparent lack of connection and dialogue between Western media perspectives and Chinese. Bloomberg and Caixin’s reporting on the same project in Sri Lanka is a case in point. In their article, Bloomberg elevate local voices, opening the piece with an anecdote about a local farmer and his family drying rice on a newly built road, financed with Chinese money. Caixin on the other hand, puts its spotlight on local engineers and contractors who are benefiting from more business opportunities, treating local fishing community voices as footnotes and, as this blog previously pointed out, “like fire hoops for Chinese actors to jump through.”

It’s as if the two operate in separate bubbles, when in fact they could and should be in dialogue, both complementing and critiquing each other’s coverage.

This article’s overview and critique of some of the key narrative framings Western media are using in their coverage of the Belt and Road Initiative is intended to trigger awareness of and reflection on these framings. Some may see more framings out there, or see the above as overly simplified. My hope, however, is that through an awareness of the presence of these narrative framings readers, journalists and researchers will take note and see the gaps and blind spots that may exist in current reporting on BRI, with the ultimate purpose to improve, diversify and strengthen media coverage of what is surely one of the most important and rapidly unfolding stories across the world right now.

Tom Baxter works in communications and on the environmental impacts of Belt and Road projects at Greenpeace East Asia. You can find him on Twitter via @TomBaxter17