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This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations in the political and material fabric of cities and their host regions. We approach BRI-related infrastructural practice through three interconnected optics – discourse, instruments, and politics – so as to interrogate the articulation of projects linked to the BRI within the material site of the urban. Based on theorisations of infrastructure from an urban perspective and a critical review of literature on the BRI itself, we develop three illustrative case studies at different spatial scales and within different geographic contexts – in Pakistan, Central Europe and the UK. To examine the cases as well as their embeddedness in broader debates on the topic, we use a systematic review methodology relying on a wide variety of sources. We offer comparative and relational perspectives on the manner in which these relatively diverse cases demonstrate China's role as a global urban actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'new' state capitalism has garnered increasing attention among scholars due to the emergence of a polymorphism of state interventions in recent years. These interventions are now being examined through a spatial lens, departing from the previously dominant methodological nationalism. In this case, the 'new' Chinese state capitalism is particularly noteworthy. The People's Republic of China (PRC) has adopted a spatial state-led strategy to facilitate the Renminbi (RMB) transnationalization. This strategic approach transcends traditional national boundaries, stretching across different spaces. Our research focuses on the specific case of Luxembourg in relation to this spatial strategy. We assert that the RMB transnationalization represents a distinctive feature of the 'new' Chinese state capitalism, as it is underpinned by explicit Chinese state policies, unlike other currencies whose global use was the result of growing economies. Moreover, we contend that the PRC's explicit policies regarding the RMB do not aim for full convertibility and widespread acceptance like the US-Dollar (USD). Instead, they prioritise its role as a trade currency for international trade settlements, as the main goal is to reduce the dependence on the USD and to create a stable International Monetary System (IMS) that will bring benefits to its trade-oriented economic model. Overall, this paper significantly contributes to the existing literature by offering a novel perspective on the RMB transnationalization within the framework of the 'new' Chinese state capitalism, emphasising China's quest for autonomy from the USD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts a discourse analysis of Chinese tourist writings about Africa on the most popular Chinese online tourist forum, Mafengwo (hornet's nest). By examining 2,950 travelogues collected online, our research finds that Chinese tourists' conceptions of Africa are mainly built through 5 frames, including the exotic frame, the adventurous frame, the poverty frame, the China's engagement frame, and the affection frame that describe Africa as a remote, exotic, adventurous, dangerous, miserable, and backward place compared to a modern China that strongly supports Africa's development. Much tourist writing corresponds with the official Chinese geopolitical narrative of China-Africa relations that perceives China itself as a peacefully rising power who would also like to help developing others like Africa. However, we also find that some Chinese tourists' descriptions of Africa fit uneasily into the official Chinese geopolitical conceptions, in which they demonstrate affection for Africa, but only in regard to its Western aspects, e.g., architecture, food, activities. One contribution of this study is providing a bottom-up Chinese citizenry discourses and cultural experiences of Africa, and with this empirical analysis it updates theories of everyday Chinese geopolitics of tourism. We think this study is unique in that we have broadened the understanding of both official and citizenry Chinese geopolitical conceptions and their (dis)connections, in particular from the everyday encounter between geopolitics and tourism, which also sets a frame for comprehending Chinese citizenry geopolitical conceptions of the outside 'other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel booking engines can produce, resist, and destabilise popular and state-directed geopolitical representations of a world neatly divided into national and international space. Although they present as strictly functional technical platforms, booking engines obscure and omit what is contingent and contested in the production of a destination as a bordered national territory. Due to their embedding in the webs of political representation, these systems and their backers can become targets for economic boycotts, political threats, hacks, or other interventions when territorial designations are contested. Such interventions manifest as political performances aimed at multiple audiences, including tourists and travellers, as well as the businesses and political entities that facilitate or inhibit their circulation, with spillover effects into other domains of geopolitical representation. To empirically illustrate this argument, the paper analyzes the People's Republic of China's mostly successful efforts to coerce the international travel industry to relist destinations within Taiwan as belonging to China. By extending the notion of border performativity into the 'code/spaces' that span the online and offline worlds, it concludes that booking engines, like other forms of infrastructure that serve travellers and tourists, can produce popular geopolitical effects that exceed their own technical systems. Peering through these ruptures reveals the uneasy and unstable assemblages of travel infrastructure and territorial representation that regulate global mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the geopolitics of the Falun Gong (FLG) and how its practices challenge the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) authority within the Chinese state. Drawing upon Laclau and Mouffe's concept of discourse, I analyse the FLG's scriptures in order to understand how its millennial ideas of 'telling-truth/saving-life' and 'reviving five thousand years of civilization' have developed since the People's Republic of China's (PRC) ban and crackdown on the FLG since 1999. Based on the FLG's resources and my fieldwork data, this paper also demonstrates how the concepts of 'telling-truth/saving-life' were practised and coordinated globally. This paper presents the dynamic relationship between spirituality and geopolitics. It demonstrates how politics are spiritually interpreted and how critical spiritual discourses are converted to geopolitical practices that challenge the authority of an atheist state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The completion of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge marks not only a record-setting achievement in engineering, but also a materialisation of ongoing efforts by the People's Republic of China to engage in cooperative projects aimed at expanding and deepening integrative connections with the semi-autonomous Special Administrative Regions of Macau and Hong Kong. This paper explores the colonial and post-colonial social construction of Hong Kong as a political-economic island, and the implications this carries into the tensions and open conflicts that have unfolded under the One Country, Two Systems agreement. Using the bridge as a case, it critically examines the geopolitical and biopolitical dimensions of infrastructure as a practice of subnational (de)bordering. The case renders visible a contemporary moment where infrastructure occupies a central position at the conjuncture of technology, advanced governmentality and shifting geographies of sovereignty in the People's Republic of China, within subnational city-regional development plans, as well as internationally in projects, such as the geographically expansive Belt and Road Initiative. A close examination of the Bridge project highlights the constructed and contested nature of borders, as well as the complex identities and ideologies that define them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps out contemporary discourses of Chinese diplomacy that have proliferated under the aegis of 'major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics'. We examine how these narratives are underpinned by webs of relationality that see China promoting equal and win–win partnerships with other state actors, yet are also defined by hierarchical premises for such diplomatic engagements. These relational contradictions are most clearly manifested when we interrogate the spatial dynamics of China's diplomatic endeavours through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). By scrutinising the geopolitical imaginations, sites and scales associated with the BRI, we turn attention to three spatial tensions that are closely bounded up with the relational contradictions of Chinese diplomacy: 'win–win' diplomacy promoting a 'harmonious world' versus territorially based diplomacy; periphery diplomacy versus the global ambitions of BRI; and the centralisation versus decentralisation dimensions of Chinese diplomacy. This allows us to make sense of the multiplicity of descriptors that have been affixed to Chinese diplomacy, in order to underscore the 'work' they perform to bequeath (at times, divergent and contested) meanings to China's new foreign policy approach. Hence, a relational and spatial understanding of Chinese diplomacy, we argue, can reveal a more nuanced picture of the promises, potential and disjunctures of China's rapidly expanding geopolitical and diplomatic actions on the international stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines China's Belt and Road Initiative as an exercise in geocultural power. To date, Belt and Road has been analysed as a geopolitical and geo-economic initiative, with arguments constructed around the development of infrastructure, trade or finance agreements. This paper introduces the Silk Roads as one of the most compelling geocultural concepts of the modern era to show its strategic value as a platform for cooperation and multi-sector connectivity. A critical analysis of the Silk Roads provides new insights into Belt and Road, revealing how China is mobilising its geocultural potential as a civilisational state to build regional and continental connectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With China's continuous rise and growing external commercial, strategic, and political endeavours, questions have arisen about the motivation, timing, and locale of China's outreaching strategies. This research analyzes China's overseas port investments through a comparative study of Greece and Pakistan, two important partners of China's Belt and Road Initiative. Adopting the neoclassical realist framework and drawing on expert interviews, official statistics, and policy documents, this paper reveals how China's economic security objectives in combination with changing geopolitical structures led to its external port investments. This research contributes to the studies on rising powers and geopolitics by showing how China as a rising power capitalizes on geopolitical opportunities created by the changing interests of dominant powers to expand its presence in strategically important regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 5–10 years, a growing number of Chinese scholars and policy experts have sought to theorise the 'development' of other peoples and places in the Global South. These intellectual efforts include building temporal frameworks for describing development processes, and often, an implicit set of directives for effecting positive change. Drawing on eight months' fieldwork in Beijing, this paper examines the representational practices of depicting development and its temporal dimension that have been mobilised in the ongoing production of Chinese international development thinking. In particular, it is concerned with the ways in which temporal distance and proximity have been constructed to provide a theoretical and moral justification for China's intensifying geopolitical and economic preoccupations. We argue that more than a system of explanations, current Chinese thinking contains and expresses a recalibrated will to geopolitical power, which has had a conditioning effect on the enframing of the meanings and relations of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study interrogates the geopolitical nature of China's Xisha tourism, and unravels the territorial politics played out in tourism, while examining the complex interplay between tourism and territorialisation. It demonstrates that Xisha tourism is inherently geopolitical and integral to China's comprehensive territorialisation strategy in the South China Sea (SCS). It reveals that Xisha tourism is politically oriented, highly regimented, and performatively constituted. Tourism and territorialisation are found to be mutually constituted and interdependent. The main argument of this study is that tourism should be conceptualised as a constitutive dimension of geopolitical restructuring processes in the SCS, and an essential part of the performative and discursive assemblage that sustains the state's will to claim territorial possession of the SCS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the approaches of critical geopolitics, the authors compare Russian official, expert and media discourses on Russian-Chinese relations and China including such issues as its domestic and foreign policies, its role in the world, economic development and military potential. To study the official political discourse, more than 300 official documents were collected, including speeches, presentations and interviews by Russian leaders from 2012 to 2019. The screening of the Vesti news programme at the "Russia-1" state federal TV channel served a basis for the media discourse analysis. A scrutiny of about 2,900 articles on China and Russian-Chinese relations found in course of screening of 2012–2019 issues of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a daily federal "intellectual" newspaper destined to highly educated audience that pays much attention to foreign policy, was selected as a source of information on the expert discourse. The authors conclude that there is a clear gap between the official and expert discourse on China. While most of the participants agree that there is no alternative to a partnership with the great eastern neighbour, many experts express their concerns about the growing asymmetry in the two countries' potential. This difference arises from the lack of confidence at the grassroots level as well as from the fact that some Russian partners seek to excuse their failures by blaming them on China's unwillingness to compromise. In conclusion the authors consider the influence that different discourses have on Russian public opinion using the results of national surveys and focus groups. They show that part of the elite itself, accustomed to certain doubts about the possibility of strategic cooperation with China, reproduces a sceptical attitude towards the Chinese partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, Burma/Myanmar one-sidedly halted the billions-worth construction of Myitsone Dam, derailing China's then-largest-ever hydroelectric project abroad and creating a lasting controversy in China–Burma relations. This decision followed an unprecedented public outcry in Burma and a decade of inter-ethnic resistance against this mega-project. This article explores how, throughout the Myitsone Dam controversy, actors at different scales and in three national societies speculated about hidden hostile inter-national plots behind the project or the resistance. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in 2010–2019, interviews, and media analysis, this article takes seriously many Chinese, Burmese, and Kachin voices – from ambassadors and journalists, to activists and village elders – who claim or dispute various hidden hostile inter-national strategies. The Myitsone case shows how deeply inter-national speculating shapes Burma, often in ways that erase ethnic-minority actors, popular movements, or dispossession. More broadly, it shows how nationalist thinking and competing nationalisms can shape ideas about a frontier of resource extraction. Finally, ethnographic research has often revealed how marginalised people's conspiratorial narratives can reflect realities, but this study suggests using ethnography to let people challenge dominant conspiracy theories about themselves. Researchers across ethnographic disciplines, International Relations, and critical geopolitics face the analytical and ethical challenge of both contextualising and evaluating any people's claim that someone plots against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many analysts and practitioners argue that the United States should actively engage in geoeconomic competition with China. This article suggests that an argument against this claim can be counter-intuitively derived from offensive realism – an influential international relations theory known for its pessimism on great power relations. Offensive realism suggests that a great power should try to maximize its material capacity and pay careful attention to the balance of material power between major states. It also suggests that a great power should avoid spending its limited resources in influence or legitimacy competition in the peripheries. In this context, offensive realism prescribes that the United States should not actively oppose Chinese economic initiatives unless those projects have meaningful impact on the bilateral balance of power and its security. On the contrary, Washington should encourage China to expand its investments in geoeconomic initiatives since China is likely to end up spending a large amount of its resources in regions that do not have significant implications to the balance of material power. For offensive realists, a great power should take balance of power competition in major regions seriously, not influence competition around the globe. Accordingly, the United States should restrain itself and avoid geoeconomically confronting China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Uyghur communities in China often focuses on the power and oppression of the Chinese state, neglecting the power situated in the domestic sphere and women's bodies. My research addresses how younger Uyghur women (aged 18–35 years old) feel suffocated by the expectations of their ethnocultural identity, and how those women both conform to and reject social norms. The themes of marriage and clothing illustrate how representations and discourses of the female body reinforce the boundaries of the Uyghur community. The pleasure and pain of Uyghur identity manifests in women's bodies during territorial insecurity of fading nationalist space. Multiple scales of identity in the body and household disrupt the imaginary cohesiveness and boundedness of territory. While the Chinese state polices Uyghur bodies, so too does Uyghur society police the bodies of other Uyghurs – especially women – as a security strategy of bordering the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]