Power of blank spaces: A critical cartography of China's Belt and Road Initiative

1. INTRODUCTION

Beginning in 2013, the Chinese government officially prioritised geoeconomic connectivity as one of the distinguishing features of China’s global vision through its announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in speeches in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. In so doing, contemporary notions of ‘Global China’ rapidly emerged, both theoretically and empirically, which differed from previous versions of international capitalist development. From ‘Going West’ to ‘Going Out’ as well as early forms of Beijing’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ programmes, China’s geoeconomic objectives now clearly prioritise connectivity.

Geopolitical depictions of the BRI, although varied, also employ discursive tactics to emphasise international connectivity (Demiryol, 2019; Derudder et al., 2018; Wang, 2018; Xi, 2014). This connectivity discourse rests on notions of universally comprehensible principles of ‘mutual exchange and prosperity’ (Liu & Dunford, 2016), frequently framed by Chinese leaders and target country leadership alike as involving ‘win-win’ interactions between states (Wang & Li, 2019). For governments in the Global South, the BRI often appears to directly address long standing challenges and struggles of ‘uneven and insufficient’ connectivity as a main hindrance to national development goals (Bachmann et al., 2021).

To ground the sometimes abstract aims of connectivity, corridors are routinely invoked and cartographically rendered as infrastructural projects and multi-state endeavours to help countries realise (and visualise) their own geoeconomic aspirations. That is, corridors represent both physical realisations and discursive aspirations of connectivity; in other words, corridors are ‘an often-cited vehicle for achieving these connections’ (Hillman, 2018, p. 2). While such maxims of economic progress are easily digestible and interpreted – by both political elites and public citizenry alike – the harmonious depiction of connectivity as the main driver of the BRI, in reality, ‘obfuscates rather than engages past geopolitical tensions and interimperial rivalries’ (Grant, 2018, 2020, p. 1; see also Sidaway & Woon, 2017).

We argue that widespread emphasis on corridors in the making of the BRI is fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, popular geoeconomic discourse has in some instances materialised with the construction and completion of operationally functional corridors (e.g., roads, highways, bridges, sea-lanes) designed to grow transport linkages between countries and across regions. On the other hand, corridors rarely operate as the frictionless avenues for the free flow of goods as they are often portrayed by governments and businesses. Rather, they are invariably also characterised by points of delay, disruption, bottlenecks and breakdowns – spaces of friction otherwise known as ‘chokepoints’.

The geopolitical discourse of the BRI (emanating both from Chinese leadership in Beijing as well as from international economic actors (e.g., Eastern and Western governments and businesses)) is that corridors are considered as the dominant reality of the BRI, when in fact it is the existence and interaction between corridors and chokepoints (the corridor-chokepoint dialectic) that more accurately and completely captures the political economic reality of the BRI on the ground. In view of the regular tension between connectivity and friction that appears definitive to experiences with infrastructure development, we propose the ‘corridor-chokepoint dialectic’ as a new concept for analysing and understanding China’s BRI programme. Like corridors, chokepoints are also manifested in actual geographic features as well as discursive practices, both of which complicate geopolitics and render political economic practices contentious and debatable. In this paper, we complement an examination of the material realities of chokepoints with a close analysis of their discursive properties. In doing so, we expand upon how discursive constructions of chokepoints play an equally important role in hindering and complicating actual, on-the ground connectivity between countries and within regions. To be clear, we contend that both corridors and chokepoints play a fundamental role in geoeconomic objectives behind BRI imaginaries, where ‘infrastructure is the practice and outcome of connectivity’ (Flint & Zhu, 2019, p. 100).

In this paper, we demonstrate the analytical utility of the corridor-chokepoint dialectic by highlighting the paradoxes of infrastructure development in multiple BRI-corridor countries neighbouring China: namely, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar. Our analysis calls out the need for geography as a discipline to focus more attention towards the on-the-ground impediments that shape the reality of the BRI as much as (if not more than) the lofty-aims of corridorization across trans-Eurasian space. Emphasising the importance of a geographical approach, we employ a geopolitical lens to analyse the productive tensions between flows and blockages related to, but also going beyond, BRI development emanating from different global regions, including Southeast, South and Central Asia. As an intersection and spatial node of multiple corridors, the BRI plays a special role in an era where ‘the spatiality of global and regional connectivity is reconfigured through the process of China’s integration with the world’ and where ‘corridorization as a dominant physical and ideational process shapes Chinese investment projects and reconfigures state spatiality along the BRI’ (Mayer & Zhang, 2021, p. 974).

Our analysis is interdisciplinary, grounded in the spatialities of human geography but connecting and contributing to literature on the BRI, corridors and chokepoints from socio-cultural anthropology and security studies. We employ a political geographical analytic which accounts for multiple major political rivalries at play, in this case sometimes relating to ‘China versus the West’. In addition to pointing attention to how this study’s focal countries are affected by such rivalries, we also recognise the present geopolitical importance of other major political players from the Global South, such as India (Singh, 2023). Our study also complicates prevailing realist approaches which associate bottlenecks with power and competition relating to needs associated with protecting the state. By applying our corridor-chokepoint dialectic to the study of the BRI and Global China, our aim is to bring a critical geographical sensibility to bear on scholarship at the intersection of social science and policy-relevant research.

Our paper is organised as follows. We first conceptualise a corridor-chokepoint dialectic and establish a framework to more critically examine the tensions between BRI connectivity and friction. Above all, we do this to more broadly show how socio-technical systems operate through space and over time. Reading across literatures in human geography, anthropology and security studies, we highlight the dominant narratives that generally (but surely do not exclusively) characterise corridors and chokepoints in cross-disciplinary scholarship on the BRI. Following this conceptualisation and review of the literature, in the next section we examine and discuss key contradictions of the BRI through the lens of our corridor-chokepoint dialectic. We draw attention to the presence of such dialectical tensions in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar to establish a wider application for our conceptual contributions and the paper itself.

Finally, the conclusion underscores the analytical utility of the corridor-chokepoint dialectic in shaping the political-economic contours of the BRI as they impact different sovereign spaces and actors across Eurasia today.