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Over the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs, has turned thousands of hectares of forests into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities and displaced persons relying on these lands for their livelihoods and refuge. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/KIA), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the more spectacular politics of the grand infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in this region. Moving across plantation sites, armed bases and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and farmers, the paper explores how plantations have transformed not only environmental space but also social-political dynamics of Kachin State in ways, we argue, that are more difficult to reverse than previous or ongoing military territorialization. In doing so, we aim to localize and contextualize the plantation as a key force rapidly transforming Asian borderworlds, over which broader socio-political struggles, environmental transformations, nature loss, connectivity and developmental become imbricated with bordering space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a mega-project of primarily infrastructure-related loans and investments in Pakistan. Recently, the official discourse has increasingly shifted to the agricultural sector. For the region of Gilgit-Baltistan bordering China, academic and policy debates highlight the potential boost of fruit exports to China as the most promising opportunity to be leveraged through the CPEC. This paper scrutinizes these promises from a locally grounded perspective, investigating potential benefits and risks for local farmers. To make sense of the complex interplay between external and local actors, interests, markets and (infra)structures, the paper follows an assemblage-inspired approach to map out local trajectories. Contrary to the CPEC narrative, agricultural exports from Gilgit-Baltistan recently came to a halt, due to increasing trade barriers and seemingly competing agricultural developments in neighboring Xinjiang, China. Moreover, the economically most promising local crop for export to China, namely cherries, does not seem too promising for the majority of small farmers. There are other commodities with export potential, but overall, prospects appear to be limited. There is a need for a deeper engagement with the inherent complexities of CPEC trajectories, particularly in regards to local farming contexts in Pakistan and relevant developments in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted substantial academic attention right after its establishment in 2013. It has produced an array of scientific works analyzing various aspects of this multi-component phenomenon. Our paper is an attempt to systematically classify and further scrutinize the BRI literature within the management and economics field in order to navigate further academic inquiry into the BRI phenomenon. We used the Scopus database and a guided delimitation approach to ensure the quality and relevance of the selected papers. Based on the identified themes we propose promising avenues for future research within the Economics and Management research domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comprises original research on China's use of bilateral media cooperation to mediate its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Building upon the literature on strategic narratives, aesthetic power and the Silk Road as a foreign policy concept, we present a detailed case study of the visual imagery of the "Silk Road" documentary collaboration between China's and Russia's state-owned international broadcasters, China Radio International and RT (formerly Russia Today). We employ a visual methodology to interrogate the formation and projection of multimodal (visual, textual and oral) narratives about China's infrastructural activities along this metaphorical new "Silk Road". We examine how the Silk Road series gives sense to China's BRI, the relative weighting of Chinese and Russian strategic narratives about the BRI, and how power is distributed in this Chinese-Russian media partnership. Our analysis reveals that in re-packaging visual imagery that applies nostalgia to the history of core places and technologizes their future, the series projects a pre-curated Chinese visual narrative that emplots the BRI as human and cultural development. Russian regional strategic narratives are marginalized. China is applying its aesthetic power to Russian journalists and politicians; RT obtains some commercial benefits, but the Russian state's aesthetic power is ceded to China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China and Russia discover common ground in exploring the Arctic, the changing spatial dynamics create the possibility for new styles of governance in the area of combating corruption. This paper will ask whether the configuration of collaborative projects between Russian and Chinese partners will open up avenues for a shared governance of anti-corruption or whether, perhaps alternatively, there is the possibility of a non-state and post-sovereign governance model emerging. As there is little empirical evidence yet, this paper will focus on the case of "Arktik LNG-2" as the most substantial Russian-Chinese project in the Arctic to date. It argues that the set-up of this project expresses neither a shared governance nor a post-sovereign governance approach to anti-corruption. On the state-to-state level, there is no sign of China engaging with Russia. On the non-state level, there are no stakeholders that would articulate demands for anti-corruption. Instead, it is through corporate compliance policies that anti-corruption rules become applicable. But these rules are not "private" in the conventional sense. They represent a sub-state policy in the case of Russia and Party rule in the case of the Chinese counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's borderlands have received increased investment and policy attention since Beijing formally launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This special issue, comprised of four research articles and a photo essay, is designed to provide a timely intervention into the growing literature seeking to situate and assess this important policy campaign. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in China's southwestern, northwestern, and northern borderlands, the contributing authors analyze recent borderland transformations against the backdrop of the BRI. However, by shifting the analytical focus to prioritize voices and events in borderlands, the papers de-center Beijing-centric discourse on the BRI, and provide urgent reminders of region-specific geographies and histories. Taken together, the papers underscore the persistent social complexity of borderland situations, revealing intricate processes of resistance, adaptation, and muddling through, while highlighting continuities and ruptures associated with the present moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) intersect and overlap in Central Asia at the heart of Eurasia. Whereas the literature has commonly focused on the economic aspects of these major regional policy initiatives, efforts to create a common Eurasian higher education space through these regionalisms have barely been studied. In response, this paper compares the development of Russian and Chinese led visions for Eurasian higher education regionalism in Central Asia and the extent to which these constructions overlap. The paper also sheds lights on the perspectives of Central Asian states by investigating how these countries are approaching these efforts to construct a Eurasian higher education region. The conceptual framework brings together higher education regionalism with overlapping regionalism and takes a policy-oriented methodological approach. The paper introduces the new term of "points of correspondence" based on language used in both Russian and Chinese policy discourse to explain how constructions of a Eurasian higher education region can overlap without duplicating or flowing into each other. "Points of correspondence" emphasizes neither competition nor collaboration but rather the ongoing pursuit to find ideas and policy tools that best fit one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Mongolia's attempts at balancing its relations with China and Russia and the dilemmas it faces as China's influence grows in the wake of its "Belt and Road Initiative". Mongolia has embraced China's connectivity projects and a new form of trilateralism, even though Mongolia was not included in the initial five economic corridors proposed by Xi Jinping in 2013. Mongolian concerns over geo-strategic isolation led to a renewed effort to embrace its two big neighbors, resulting in the proposal of the trilateral "Economic Corridor" in 2016, followed by further trilateral summits. The paper thus seeks to answer the puzzle how Mongolia's self-perception as a geopolitical bridgehead state can be reconciled with the partially diverging interests of its two neighbors. Drawing on interviews with Mongolian experts and officials as well as qualitative document analysis, the paper adds empirical nuance to the debate about Sino-Russian interaction in Eurasia, but also to the understudied dimension of the agency of the "in-between countries" in their shared neighborhood. It argues that the spectrum ranging from competition to accommodation between China and Russia is further complicated by the choices and policy responses of actors "in between", like Mongolia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project in Myanmar, this paper contests the proposition that China's state-coordinated investments are, by nature, more accommodating to local people's demands than Western investments. Tension between Myanmar villagers and the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) in a copper mine project does not square with Beijing's "inclusive globalization" narrative. Drawing upon extensive semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in a Sino-Myanmar copper mine project, as well as other secondary data, this study finds that the Chinese SOE's operation was reactive to the ebb and flow of social resistance and the government's pressure amid the host country's democratization in the 2010s. Reforms were more likely to occur when the Chinese SOE observed more domestic constraints in its operation environment. It showed less incentive to improve its business practices when societal actors failed to display strong resistance, and the host government did not care about its legitimacy. Despite Beijing's efforts to craft an image of itself as a responsible power, conflicts in the BRI project should not be simplified as the SOE's defiance of the state's regulations. They are rooted in the state-centric foreign policy that systematically overlooks societal actors in state-coordinated investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By way of introduction to the four papers that follow, we chart some key parameters of debate about finance and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In particular, we argue that the rise of discourses about "predatory lending" and "debt trap" (that feature in much commentary and reportage about BRI) merits critique and contextualization. The financing needs of BRI also raise important implications for the geography of financial markets and business services in Asia and other key locations in global financial networks. The networked nature of financial centers and the vital role of advanced business services bring into view actors, sites and spaces (such as law firms and offshore centers) that have been neglected by the geopolitical lenses most often applied to analyze BRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of financing the Belt and Road Initiative sharpens the broader debates about the intentions behind and implications of the initiative, in particular, whether it represents an alternative to or within globalization (global capitalism) and the broader global order as currently constituted. This paper addresses this by examining the institutions, actors, mechanisms, and nature of the (proposed) financing of Belt and Road projects. It argues that however Chinese rhetoric on the BRI is read, looking at the financing demonstrates the structural power of the existing institutions, structures, and mechanisms of global political economy, and this will constrain Chinese ambitions to base an alternative world order on the foundations of the BRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is expected to be a "game-changer" for Pakistan's struggling economy. In China's Yunnan province, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) economic corridor promises to revive old forms of connectivity across the region. While both projects feature prominently in Xi Jinping's signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), neither is particularly new. The BCIM dates back to the Kunming Initiative of 1999, while the CPEC was initiated in the early 2010s. Following the development of both projects over the past decade, this paper shows some of the effects of economic corridors on local trade. It argues that, despite claims of inclusiveness, openness and mutual benefit, such projects often achieve the opposite. In Xinjiang, security concerns have curbed opportunities for Uyghur and Pakistani traders to carry out cross-border trade. In Yunnan, a stricter border regime is favoring well-connected elites over local actors who had been engaged in local trade for decades. I thus argue that the corridor-ization of trade along China's frontiers has brought the end of what I call proximity: the advantages intrinsic to a certain geographical, cultural and historical closeness that used to afford business opportunities to borderland communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previously articulated within several regional multilateral frameworks, the "China-Laos Railway" eventually turned into a flagship project of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Started in 2016 and planned to be completed in late 2021, this project will provide Laos with unprecedented railway infrastructure, linking its capital Vientiane with China through the northern border town of Boten. This paper critically scrutinizes the underlying geo-economic win-win rhetoric of coupling China's regional BRI ambitions with Laos' national vision of transforming into a land-linked country. Understanding the newest BRI labeling of infrastructural connectivity against the backdrop of Laos' and the region's longer-lasting neoliberal developmental trajectory, I examine the financial mechanism of the railway project and the different temporal and spatial scales of Laos' and China's calculation of potential benefits. These are juxtaposed with the empirical reality of already visible dynamics and impacts of Chinese investment alongside the railway. Together, they tend to paint a future of Chinese profits at the expense of Laos' sustainable long-term development. Contributing to much-needed grounded accounts of local unfoldings of China-backed megaprojects, I pay particular attention to vernacular discourse and experience to fully understand the nature, processes and impacts of BRI financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being neighbors, China and Central Asian states face common problems, which require collective response and leadership. In this article, we explore to what extent China's increased engagement in the region since the dissolution of the USSR has included attempts to lead cooperation to address some of these common problems. We answer our research question by exploring observable leadership efforts, such as institutional development, financial support, moral or belief supply, and unilateral exemplary activities. The analysis shows that in three selected issue areas, namely counter-terrorism, infrastructure development, and water management China has made certain efforts to lead, but the scope and character of its efforts have varied significantly between different issue areas and over time. This variation can be explained in the light of China's evolving foreign policy interests, the specificities of the Central Asian states, and the role of Russia as the other prominent external actor. While earlier China's initiatives focused on Central Asia and Russia, the more recent ones either include Central Asian states among other members or focus only on some of them. Joining China's projects helps Central Asian states to improve their international standing and diversify their foreign relations, but also affects regional geopolitical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mongolia's fabulous mineral wealth has led to competition and conflict amongst multiple stakeholders. Here we examine local struggles over extraction and export in the Sino-Mongolia Borderlands to offer a perspective on contemporary rural governance transformations in mining frontiers. Grounding years of in-country research with in-depth participant insights, we present and analyze the dilemmas faced by local government actors in Mongolia's Gobi mining belt in order to problematize the dichotomy between conflict or cooperation on the steppe. Given the fleeting and inherently environmentally destructive nature of open-pit mineral extraction on land traditionally used by mobile pastoralists, how do local authorities negotiate for a better future for their locality and constituents? Drawing inspiration from theoretical work on ruination, we highlight the material and spatial elements of contestations over land, territory and development. By leveraging laws related to environmental protection, bureaucratic procedures and corporate social responsibility, local authorities have found creative ways to slow down the physical destruction of their lands from mineral extraction, salvage space for traditional livelihoods and capture benefits for local investment. These forms of institutional resistance, however, reveal the weakening of local institutions in rural governance as local authorities and citizens are excluded from large-scale development decision-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-country related events which have been reported by news media have become important data for the study of international and regional cooperation relations. Cooperation event data from 1980 to 2015 were used to judge the positions and roles of countries located along the Belt and Road. This study's results indicate that the regional cooperation of the countries along the Belt and Road formed a bidirectional hub network structure with China and Russia as the core. The unbalanced pattern revealed showed that East Asia and South Asia were located at the core and periphery respectively; Central and Eastern Europe, along with Western Asia and the Middle East regions, were closely connected; and Central Asia was weakly connected. The level of differences, openness degree differences, and economic scale differences of the countries along the aforementioned line were found to have important influences on the strengths of the cooperative relationships. A single-center radiation structure and a multi-center tight structure were found to be the significant regional characteristics of the spatial organization pattern of the cooperation relationship network. The study provides a new perspective for identifying the structural characteristics and regional patterns of international regional cooperation relationship networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Polar Silk Road (PSR) will open up China's maritime trade route through the Arctic to Northwest Europe and affect the freight function structure of China's coastal ports. This study evaluates ports' freight capacity and predicts the freight function structure of China's coastal ports under the PSR from four dimensions, namely, comprehensive/professional, function status, function scale and function hierarchy. The freight function structure is also compared with the current one. Results show that the ports in the Bohai Rim and Yangtze River Delta will have more diversified development and become the main force of the port system under the PSR. Coal will have an important position in most ports' cargo transportation under the PSR. The PSR will bring great economic development opportunities to the northern ports because of the influence of the sea route distance. The port function hierarchy is more obvious under the PSR, and the medium-sized ports are most affected by the PSR. We classify coastal portsaccording to the freight scale and freight function. An adaptive proposal for the government's port function planning is proposed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has affected the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as a project of regional economic integration. In particular, it examines whether the EAEU and the BRI are transforming the regional division of labor in the EAEU and providing the EAEU economic periphery new opportunities for industrialization and technological upgrading through insertion into international production networks. By comparing the EAEU and the BRI with other regional economic integration processes such as the EU, NAFTA, ASEAN+3 and Mercosur, it highlights the limits of the EAEU as a tool for economic integration and for enhancing Russia's economic leadership in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) it is obvious that China is crafting a new space for itself in the international system and becoming more assertive and confident in its international dealings, including in Eurasia, typically considered by Russia as its backyard. This raises the question of how the BRI is presented and perceived in Russia. The article explores this question by examining the coverage of the BRI in Russia's major newspapers between 2013 and 2019. It traces the visibility of different topics in Russian media coverage of BRI and maps the shifts in its focus over six years. The article demonstrates that while the definition of BRI in Russian newspapers includes multiple and often contradictory discursive frames that compete with each, Sino-Russian cooperation in Eurasia and, specifically, Russian proposal of "linking up" of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and BRI are unanimously supported and approved as a strategy that suits Russia's international status. Consequently, it can be concluded that Russian newspapers support the official narrative of Sino-Russian relations and follow trends rather than create them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China's multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure program across 138 countries and counting – has provoked concern among observers that China is exporting its polluting model of development. Others, however, claim that the BRI is well-positioned to drive "green development" through investments in low-carbon infrastructure and technologies. This review article argues that discussions about "greening" the BRI can overlook the politics that infuse how green development is conceptualized and implemented, and for whose benefit. Taking a political ecology approach, I distinguish between green BRI activities that invest in low-carbon infrastructure and those that mitigate environmental risk – the latter of which are often selectively enforced, leading to "greenwashing." I then apply this distinction to three key sectors of the green BRI: green finance, green energy, and green cooperation mechanisms. I find that low-carbon investments are currently concentrated in higher-income countries and regions, while risk mitigation activities are currently concentrated in lower-income countries and regions. This article thus highlights the need for attention to how the green BRI is defined and implemented, with implications for efforts toward building an equitable and sustainable Belt and Road. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted the involvement of increasing numbers of countries in the world, but also caused a lot of concerns about its financing given its sheer size. This commentary first gives a brief introduction to China's financial resources for the BRI after an analysis of the initiative's geographical scope, including an estimation of the financial resources already mobilized for the BRI, major financial institutions in China and distribution of outstanding loans in countries along the Belt and Road among these institutions, and then it provides a preliminary outline of some BRI financing models. It argues that developing an appropriate financing model is critical for the success of the BRI, but good financing can only be explored and achieved through good financial practices, which means that China has to strengthen financial cooperation with host countries and international financial institutions. These practices will open up an interesting area of study for geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison of Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and Chinese models of development cooperation and finance is indicative of whether or not the principles underling the Belt and Road Initiative differ significantly from those of the western-dominated liberal order. In spite of superficial similarities, the Chinese model rests on a different conception of international relationships: western models derive from an experience of colonialism and are evident in interventionist models (of coordination, harmonization, monitoring and evaluation and accountability requirements) designed to expand private ownership and western governance models. The Chinese model, while reflecting China's interests, derives from China's distinctive historical experience of engagement with its peripheries as one of "chao gong" (朝贡 tribute to an Emperor), China's own experiences of colonialism and socialist development, Confucian values of self-reliance, mutual benefit (win-win) and noninterference and a concept of common values (共性 gòng xìng). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's Belt and Road Initiative has led to an efflorescence of interest in the heritage of the "Silk Road," both in China and abroad. In this article, I approach the BRI and its associated "Silk Road fever" ethnographically, discussing its effects on a particular region of China. What was once characterized in official discourse as a "remote border region" is now recovering its history of camel-based connectivity, and using this to imagine its future development. I situate this Silk Road discourse within the context of the politics of land, ethnicity, and the environment in a Chinese border region. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in this region, and analysis of local publications, the article shows how this discourse provides ethnic Mongol elites in the west of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with resources to defend pastoralist livelihoods threatened by the state's recent grassland conservation policies. I thus show how the BRI's spatial imaginary is "domesticated" in a particular part of China, and shine a light on the spatial politics which this imaginary – and the nonhumans involved in it – affords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]