The Geopolitics of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative

China’s “One Belt, One Road” project is comprised of two components: the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—that were announced separately in 2013. Each component has the potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape through the construction of interrelated infrastructure projects including ports, highways, railways and pipelines. Such hard infrastructure requires the complementary construction of soft infrastructure, such as free trade and investment agreements, and other accords. We introduce a special section focusing specifically on the geopolitics of the MSRI that stems from a workshop hosted in November 2015 in Shanghai. The origins, scope and content of the MSRI are described, along with a summary of the current literature discussing the project, and dominant geopolitical representations. The MSRI is a geopolitical project that involves a number of actors (governments, private companies and Chinese state-owned enterprises) at a number of geographic scales (cities, provinces, states and continents). Arrghi’s twin logics of territorial and economic power help frame and connect the papers of the special section to illustrate the complexity and dynamism of the geopolitics of the MSRI. The articles provide insights into the geopolitics of a large connectivity project.

Introduction Connectivity, including infrastructure, projects have long been recognised as an integral element of global political and economic change as well as a reflection of new political and economic realities. Regarding the former, Sir Halford Mackinder’s seminal contribution to classic geopolitics was based upon the transformative effects of railway routes.1 China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and its cousin the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), collectively known as the “Belt and Road” or “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative, are contemporary connectivity projects entailing massive infrastructure components that have generated heated discussion about their potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape.2 The People’s Republic of China (PRC) proposed the MSRI and SREB separately in 2013. Grand in financial, economic and geographic scale, the two schemes, which we explain at length below, have drawn significant attention from analysts, Chinese and other business people, prospective participant nations such as Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, extra-regional and regional great powers such as the United States (US), Russia, India and Japan, and researchers, among others. Many have started to ponder the political and economic implications of the MSRI and SREB for China’s economy, provinces and cities and multinational corporations (MNCs), the geo-political and geo-economic order in the Asia-Pacific Region, Central Asia, South Asia, global power structures, and patterns of investment, trade and people-to-people exchange regionally and globally. Coverage of the MSRI and SREB in policy papers and the mass media has been steadily expanding, though there are, relatively speaking, few academic treatments of these initiatives. To date, aside from providing background information, PRC scholars have, for their part, examined the banking, currency, financial and trade issues associated with China’s schemes, explored possibilities for agricultural cooperation and sought to correct misunderstandings about the purposes of China’s two plans.3 Beyond this, they have reflected on the challenges, opportunities and political and economic significance of the MSRI and SREB specifically in regard to Central Asia as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ASEAN in the context of India’s “Look East” strategy.4 Non-PRC scholars have provided background material on the two initiatives, considered their linkage to China’s grand strategy, Asia-Pacific Region politico-economic institutions and strategies of control vis-à-vis Xinjiang, and probed their relations to China’s energy security situation and sea lines of communication (SLOCs).5 As well, they have considered the projects’ implications for China-Pakistan ties, and their role in the China-Russia-US triangle and Sino-Indian interactions.6 While it certainly enriches our understanding of the MSRI and SREB, the scholarly coverage so far has some limitations. First, it is mostly descriptive and shuns the use of academic concepts from geopolitics, foreign policy analysis and international relations. In fact, many analyses are policy prescriptions rather than scholarly investigations.7 Furthermore, most works do not undertake thorough analyses of the political economy of the MSRI and SREB even though it is clear that politics and economics will be intimately intertwined and will produce political and economic effects at the global, regional, sub-regional, national and sub-national level.8 Indeed, as we later note, China has explicitly said that OBOR has political objectives. Another issue is that many students of the MSRI and SREB examine the two initiatives concurrently even though they are different in many important political, economic and social aspects, involve different countries and subnational actors, and face different topographic, political risk and environmental challenges, among other things. Multiple actors are in the process of creating diverse and interrelated geographies in these twin multi-scalar projects. Despite this geographic complexity, many researchers still study one or both schemes as a whole rather than concentrating on specific countries such as the Maldives, Kazakhstan or Afghanistan, or specific sectors such as transportation.9 Finally, many examinations of the MSRI or SREB are top-down in orientation even though actors such as state-owned and private MNCs will strive to influence MSRI and SREB policies and their implementation and affect what transpires on the ground.10 To address these shortcomings and produce an analysis that highlights the geopolitical nature of the project, the Mr. & Mrs. S.H. Wong Centre for the Study of Multinational Corporations orchestrated an international conference specifically focused on “The Political Economy of the Maritime Silk Road Initiative and South Asia,” which was held in conjunction with the East China Normal University School of Advanced International and Area Studies in November 2015 in Shanghai. Conference participants included distinguished analysts and scholars from Australia, China, India, Singapore and the United States who offered presentations on topics such as “China, India, Pakistan and the MSRI,” “Co-Constructing the MSRI: China’s Economic Potential and Prospects for Cooperation,” “China-India-Maldives and the MSRI,” “China’s Rise and the Eurasian Transportation Revolution” and “Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI), China and India: Economic Perspectives and Political Impressions.” Drawing upon the aforementioned conference, this special section of Geopolitics aims to educate readers about the features of the MSRI, distil some of the key findings from this conference and highlight their importance to those interested in geopolitical approaches while also showing the potential for analytical tools from academic geopolitical analysis to shed light on the MSRI. The next section offers a primer on the MSRI, delving into, among other things, its developments, its objectives and its accomplishments to date. The third section elaborates how the MSRI might be thought about through a geopolitical prism. The fourth section offers an overview of the papers in the special section and explains how they connect to the geopolitical themes highlighted in the third section. The last section offers some concluding remarks about the relevance of this special section for academic researchers, business people and policymakers and identifies a number of areas in need of further research.

A Primer on the MSRI In this section, we provide background on the origins of the MSRI, describe its scope and content, discuss what has been done so far to implement this scheme, survey its objectives (for a fuller treatment, see Blanchard’s individual article in the special section) and offer a brief summary of the SREB and its connection to the MSRI. In October 2013, during a speech to the Indonesian parliament that was part of his visit to various Southeast Asian nations and participation in an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum economic leaders meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the idea of a MSRI, though this was not the first time President Xi referred to the Maritime Silk Road.11 China’s contemporary MSRI (see Map Figure 1) relates, at least in the imagination, to the ancient maritime Silk Road that began in Fuzhou (a city in Fujian, China) and then went to Southeast Asia through the South China Sea and then, via the Malacca Strait, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, Europe. Of relevance for our reflections about the contemporary purposes of the MSRI, the ancient MSR served as a way for China to export its silk, ceramics and tea and connect commerce and peoples across water bodies like the East China Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.12 The Geopolitics of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative All authors Jean-Marc F. Blanchard Colin Flint https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1291503 Figure 1. China’s contemporary MSRI. Display full size Figure 1. China’s contemporary MSRI. While, per most accounts, the primary end destination of the MSRI is Europe via the Suez Canal and Mediterranean, it should be pointed out that the MSRI will also branch to various Eastern African countries such as Djibouti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania. Indeed, Brian Eyler, the Deputy Director of the Southeast Asia program at the Stimson Centre in Washington, D.C., argues that “the focus of the Maritime Silk Road is to support and facilitate booming trade growth between Asia and Africa.”13 As currently envisioned, the MSRI will incorporate and/or connect with multiple distinct transportation corridors such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the decades-old United Nations Economic and Social Commission Trans-Asia Railway that connects Kunming to Thailand, China-Bangkok-Laos and Kunming-Vietnam-Cambodia, the Mekong River Development initiative, the China-India-Bangladesh-Myanmar Economic Corridor, and the multilateral Greater Mekong Subregion Economic Cooperation Program.14 Finally, indicating that the MSRI is a “living,” mutable scheme, China issued new maps of the MSRI in April 2015 that indicate it had been extended to the South Pacific.15 While no detailed blueprint or project list has yet been made public, a major component of the MSRI will involve the building of enormous amounts of hard infrastructure such as high-speed railways, highways and truck roads, air and sea ports, utility stations and power grids, oil and natural gas pipelines and telecommunication networks. The MSRI also will entail the construction of large industrial parks and special economic zones (SEZs) coupled with manufacturing plants within these areas. Pursuant to, but also separately from these SEZ and industrial park investment dynamics, the MSRI further will witness investments in shipping, construction, energy, commerce, tourism, information technology, bio technology and alternative energy. Beyond this, the MSRI will encompass trade fairs, exhibition halls and other structures that facilitate and support economic activity along the entire breadth of the MSRI.16 Importantly, the MSRI is not just about hard infrastructure. The development of soft infrastructure is an integral part of the MSRI story, too. For the MSRI to achieve its full potential, MSRI countries will need to, among other things, conclude or build upon existing free trade agreements in order to remove barriers to the exchange of goods, negotiate aid accords for projects and conclude bilateral investment treaties that create the right ecosystem for infrastructure deals, construction initiatives, as well as liberalise market sectors for foreign investment and come to terms on agreements that allow greater cargo, passenger flights and establish or bolster financial institutions.17 China also plans to give training opportunities to more than 20,000 so-called connectivity professionals over the coming five years in order to ensure that there is adequate talent to nurture the development of the MSRI.18 It is apparent that top Chinese leaders want to take the MSRI beyond our traditional understandings of hard and soft infrastructure. Speaking about the MSRI at a gathering of numerous Asian nations prior to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economic summit in Beijing in November 2014, Chinese President Xi said “linking Asian countries is ‘not merely about building roads and bridges or making linear connection of different places … it should be a three-way combination of infrastructure, institutions and people-to-people exchanges and five-way progress in policy communication, infrastructure connectivity, trade link[s], capital flow[s] and understanding among peoples.’”19 Echoing this, Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli said at the May 2015 Asia-Europe Meeting Industry Dialogue on Connectivity that the MSRI was not just about physical infrastructure but roads, people-to-people exchanges, policy coordination and trade and capital flows. Furthermore, it involved openness in education, employment and tourism markets.20 China has been working vigorously to bring the MSRI to fruition. To illustrate, it has created a $40 billion “Silk Road Fund” (SRF), an infrastructure financing vehicle that will supply funding to finance the construction of MSRI and other infrastructure. As well, it has established the $50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is not just focused on funding MSRI-related projects, though this certainly will be one of its purposes. Beijing also will make other funding sources available for the MSRI. For instance, China Development Bank reportedly plans to invest more than $890 billion.21 On top of this, in August 2015, China’s State Administrative of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), which manages China’s foreign currency reserves, injected $90 billion into the China Development Bank and the Export–Import Bank of China (“China Exim Bank”), to support the MSRI and other development/infrastructure projects.22 Importantly, China has done more than just create financial institutions and boost their financial reserves. According to official Chinese media, the China Exim Bank alone funded more than 1,000 MSRI and SREB-related projects in 2015 in sectors such as electricity, resources and transportation.23 Looking specifically at the MSRI and South Asia, China has vigorously pursued warmer relations with a numerous participating countries. For instance, in the case of the Maldives, President Xi paid a state visit to the country in 2014, China has expanded trade and tourism with the country and China has concluded a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) pursuant to which the Maldives official joined the MSRI.24 With respect to Sri Lanka, a country Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi labelled a “‘dazzling pearl on the Maritime Silk Road,’” in 2013 the two countries elevated their relationship to a “strategic partnership” as well as signed a joint communique calling for closer maritime security and defence cooperation and enhanced Chinese involvement in infrastructure projects.25 Diplomatic and political interactions with countries such as Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran and Singapore now regularly incorporate conversations about the MSRI and ways that China and other countries can enhance their MSRI-related interactions and maximize the gains derived from cooperation in regards to MSRI activities and projects.26 In terms of hard infrastructure, it is extremely difficult to isolate projects in South Asia that tie exclusively to the MSRI. Nevertheless, the MSRI does seem to be linked to a number of energy, transportation and other projects ongoing or completed in diverse MSRI participant countries such as Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As far as the Maldives is concerned, significant activities include a prospective China-Maldives Friendship Bridge that would link the capital and the country’s international airport and for which a MOU has been signed, as well as China’s potential construction of roads in the capital coupled with an upgrading of the airport.27 Noteworthy examples include China’s allocation of $46 billion, through mechanisms such as the Silk Road Fund, for diverse airport, hydropower, pipeline, port, power plant, railway and road projects in Pakistan (a number with some relation to the Silk Road Economic Belt) and the multi-billion dollar Colombo Port City and Hambantota port and Hambantota international airport project in Sri Lanka.28 China’s MSRI has multiple economic goals, which are dealt with briefly here, but addressed more extensively in Blanchard’s piece in this special section. One of the most important is to sustain and boost China’s growth. This is to be accomplished by leveraging the MSRI to promote trade and support industries with surplus capacity to sell more goods. In addition, the MSRI should boost China’s growth indirectly by supporting the development of countries involved in the MSRI through the provision of aid, investment and loans, new markets, and technology. Furthermore, in the words of a China Exim Bank spokesperson, the MSRI is intended to create a “‘unified regional market and industrial value chains.’”29 Beyond the above, China intends to use the MSRI to facilitate the drawing down of its massive foreign currency reserves by funding MSRI-related projects. It is hoped, too, that the MSRI will reduce China’s trade frictions with the Western world. The domestic/internal objectives of the MSRI often are neglected or covered only in passing, but should not be. It is anticipated that the MSRI will accelerate regional development at the provincial and city level, will enhance national integration and economic coordination among China’s subnational divisions and help advance China’s “Go West” initiative focused on the western provinces. The economic goals just enumerated suggest the MSRI’s potential positive economic implications, though they do not cover the full range of possibilities. After all, some companies and workers in MSRI participant countries may lose from greater flows of Chinese imports, the entry of competitive Chinese firms into their home territories or increased competition in third markets. Such a phenomenon has been witnessed in the case of Latin American countries like Brazil.30 It also is conceivable that investment may be diverted away from non-MSRI participant or peripheral MSRI countries into MSRI-participant countries or China as MNCs, and other investors seek to profit from the opportunities afforded by the MSRI.31 Aside from these potential negative ramifications, it is possible that firms from extra-regional players such as Japan and the United States may face new pressures as the MSRI increases flows of Chinese goods to and the overseas presence of Chinese MNCs in MSRI participant countries and orients MSRI economies towards Beijing. In short, the MSRI can have positive and negative economic effects with the net effect depending upon firm-, national- and regional-level conditions and policies with respect to China and participant countries. The MSRI and the related SREB can be considered as distinct projects. In September 2013, a month before his speech introducing the MSRI, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the SREB during a speech in Kazakhstan. The SREB will entail a thoroughfare or Eurasian Land Bridge connecting the Pacific with the Baltic through a series of transportation routes (air, rail, road), key cities and industrial parks as well as bilateral and multilateral cooperation in areas such as currency, finance, investment, people-to-people exchanges, policy coordination, transportation infrastructure and trade liberalisation. As far as the geography of the SREB is concerned, in its 2015 “White Paper” on the SREB and MSRI (formally called the “Vision and Actions on Jointly building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road”; hereinafter the “SREB/MSRI Vision”), the Chinese government specifically enunciates that the SREB “focuses on bringing together China, Central Asia, Russia and Europe (the Baltic); linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and West Asia; and connecting China with Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean.” Specific countries to be involved in the SREB include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Mongolia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey.32 To advance its plan, China has concluded a number of formal agreements with prospective SREB participants. For instance, in December 2014, it signed a “Joint Construction of Silk Road Economic Belt” agreement with Kazakhstan.33 Roughly five months later, it entered into an agreement with Russia entitled the “Joint Statement on Cooperation between Construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and Eurasian Economic Union.”34 The following month, it finalised an accord with Uzbekistan called “Agreement on Expanding Mutually Beneficial Trade and Economic Cooperation Under the Framework of ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ Initiative.”35 At the start of 2016, Beijing and Cairo signed a “Memorandum of Understanding on Jointly Promoting Construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.”36 The SREB envisions many areas of cooperation, with one of the most prominent being energy. To illustrate, by the end of 2013, PetroChina had more than 30 overseas projects along the span of the SREB. Examples include the Aktobe, PK, Mangistaumunaigas and Sino-Kazakhstan Oil Pipeline projects (Kazakhstan), the Amu Darya Right Bank” natural gas project (Turkmenistan), the Ahdab, Rumaila and Halfaya projects (Iraq): the Central Asia Gas Pipeline with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and the China-Russia crude oil pipeline.37 The realm of transportation (e.g. railways, roads and ports) will constitute a second area of cooperation. Among other things, the SREB anticipates long-distance train systems linking Chongqing, Harbin, Zhengzhou to Hamburg, Suzhou to Warsaw and Yiwu to Madrid.38 A third realm of interaction will be “cultural and academic exchanges, personnel exchanges and cooperation, media cooperation, youth and women exchanges and volunteer services.”39 In line with this, on 22 May 2015, the President of Xi’an Jiaotong University, together with the representatives of universities from 22 different countries, issued the Xi’an Declaration, which declared the establishment of a “‘University Alliance of the New Silk Road’ (UANSR) to contribute to the common development of civilisations and the open collaboration in higher education.”40 One source of financing for the SREB that China has put in place is the aforementioned Silk Road Fund.41 The SREB has many objectives, some of which mirror the goals of the MSRI. As noted by the vice chairman of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade Wang Jinzhen, one objective is to promote the development of backward western Chinese provinces such as Gansu, Guangxi, Ningxia, Shanxi, Yunnan and Xinjiang.42 A second is to help produce a more favourable regional/domestic security environment in China’s western areas that confront the challenges of religious extremism, separatism and terrorism. China hopes cooperation with and the development of Central Asian countries can help to ameliorate such challenges.43 A third is to build the transportation systems that will open new markets to China that can help absorb its excess capacities. A fourth is to reduce China’s dependence on sea based energy transportation routes that lead through vulnerable choke points such as the Strait of Malacca.44 In the words of the SREB/MSRI Vision, the SREB has equal importance with the MSRI and complements it because both schemes ultimately function to interconnect the dynamic East Asian economic region with the developed European economic circle. More concretely, the new Eurasian Land Bridge that will result from the SREB and the effort to link China, Central Asia and West Asia as well as China, the Indochina Peninsula and South Asia will witness the development of transportation routes (e.g. the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor) that connect the land to major seaports, enhance SREB participant ties with ASEAN countries and improve the value of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement. As observers have noted, both plans are represented to share the same values, which are “peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit.”45 The representation of the MSRI, and other elements of the OBOR, as peaceful and economic jars with other portrayals of China’s increasing role in the world as a challenge to the United States and a potential harbinger of conflict. The existence of competing representations requires that we turn to describing a geopolitical framework with which we can objectively understand and interpret the MSRI.

Thinking about the MSRI through a Geopolitical Perspective Geopolitics is a combination of practices and representations that transform the built environment and the political organisation of space, and how different parts of the world are labelled.46 The goals, actions and outcomes of geopolitics are a combination of politics and economics so that geopolitics is not best seen either as purely political or strategic or narrowly as geoeconomics.47 Instead, a political economy approach that sees capital accumulation and territorial control as necessarily and mutually supporting activities is the most effective way to interpret geopolitical projects such as the MSRI.48 Moreover, geopolitics is not only about constructing representations of the world, a discursive approach to geopolitics, nor is it simply another word for state foreign policy. Geopolitics is a set of transformative projects that are the product of actions that require representations and narratives to justify and explain those actions to limit dissent and gain consensus across a variety of audiences. For example, the MSRI is an expression of geopolitical practices as investments are made and, for example, new port facilities built. The MSRI is also represented in a variety of ways, especially by the Chinese government, as a form of economic development that will benefit all countries involved. Alternative representations see it as a national and zero-sum, strategy. The ability of one of these representations to become widely accepted, or “common sense,” will play an important role in whether the practices of investment, trade, etc., that together will constitute the MSRI, are able to be completed. Hence, geopolitical practices and representations are essential and related parts of a project such as the MSRI. States require capital accumulation to finance their ability to control territory, and entrepreneurs require states to legitimise private property and contracts.49 The outcome of the interaction between ostensibly separate political and economic imperatives is a series of “spatial fixes” in which investment is captured in to particular geographic expressions for a period of time that enable capital accumulation.50 Arrighi has captured this interaction through dual expressions of power. On the one hand, M-T-M’ emphasises that power may be gained by increasing control of capital in the form of economic resources or profit making (from M to M’), but this requires the construction of certain geographical entities (T), Harvey’s spatial fixes, to ensure the realisation of investments.51 On the other hand, T-M-T’ emphasises an increase in power through gaining control of territory (from T to T’), but this requires capital (M) to finance such territorial projects. Of course, Arrighi’s heuristic formulas simply provide insight into the geopolitics of the messy real world that is the outcome of these two fused and mutually supportive processes. The MSRI, as the following essays illustrate, is a complex combination of actions that involve economic and territorial imperatives. The MSRI is a geopolitical project that aims to construct built landscapes to enable flows of trade and investment. As such, it is the product of and arena for a variety of geopolitical actors. Some of these actors may be seen as “economic,” if we wish to view the world through the narrow perspective of social science disciplines, such as MNCs, and others as “political,” such as states. Yet this is a false binary, as the interaction between Arrighi’s two formulas of power makes clear. Ostensibly territorial actors (such as mayors, provincial governors, and state leaders) are using their ability to control geographic entities to make decisions about economic investments. Similarly, MNCs construct, for example, port facilities and rail networks, through the behest of political leaders and with an eye to transforming cities, provinces, states and regions to enhance their ability to make future profits. The interaction and mutual need between territorial actors and MNCs illustrate that the MSRI is a multi-scalar and relational geopolitical project. The actions of one actor can only be understood in relation to the actions of other actors, often separated by large distances and state borders. The constant shifting of strategies and outcomes is a product of or the ability to gain cooperation, or not, from other actors that are necessary for the successful completion of the myriad of plans that, in combination, are intended to complete the MSRI. This relational dance occurs between actors that may be seen, initially, as primarily performing at a particular geographical scale. For example, we can talk of foreign policy elites in China attempting to make national scale decisions or a mayor as a city scale actor. However, the more accurate framing is to see the MSRI as a particular manifestation of what has been labelled “glocalisation”52 in which any action occurs through a hierarchy of scales. For example, the action of a port authority to modernise their facilities to make them attractive to investors is simultaneously a local action with global implications regarding the success and form of the MSRI. A simple way to tie these concepts is to see the MSRI as a geopolitics of site and situation that is transformative at many different levels – business, places, regions and global.53 The MSRI creates relations across the globe by connecting different places with their specific economic and political attributes (site) that are an important part of the web of relations because of the importance of their relative geographic location (situation) in the grand scheme of the MSRI project. Relative geographic location is a function of physical geography and economic or strategic spaces, such as an accessible port with an economically relevant hinterland. The concepts of site and situation emphasise the role of connectivity in creating geopolitical landscapes and by extension the political geography of infrastructure projects. The MSRI is a massive geopolitical project based on infrastructure development similar to other grand schemes in history: For example, the Berlin to Baghdad railway was seen as altering the balance of power prior to World War One while the Japanese development of Manchukuo as a means to counter the dominance of Western imperialism. Some Western commentators have tended to portray the MSRI or more specifically the broader OBOR project, through the rather jaded eyes of traditional geopolitical competition and geographical determinism.54 However, geopolitics is not a predictive framework. Rather, the question that only history will be able to answer is whether China’s “promises” of mutually beneficial economic gains and diverse political benefits will prevail versus concerns of state versus state winners and losers. The MSRI could be an emerging manifestation of established state versus state competition through the control of economic resources; a practice of what John Agnew has been labelled the modern geopolitical imagination.55 Or the MSRI could be a key project in the emergence of a new form of political economic development based on interconnectivity or flows rather than territorial control, a geopolitical imagination for a globalised world.56 The possible transformative impacts of the MSRI provoke situating the project within temporal, and not just geographic, contexts. Western commentators, especially in the United States, have been quick to represent the MSRI as a geopolitical threat. On the other hand, Chinese leaders have consistently refused to frame the project as a component of realist geopolitical competition.57 It is tempting to situate the development of the MSRI, and the US reaction, within the temporal sequence of hegemonic cycles. World-systems theorists frame the rise to hegemonic power through the ability to project economic advantage through trade and investment. Additionally, the creation of ways thinking and acting is a feature of hegemonic power, and58 arguably in the form of soft infrastructure, the MSRI is promoting. Ex-President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and negative reaction to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank could be interpreted as a weakening of the ability of the United States to set the global political agenda and feel pressure to exert its authority through military means. These twin developments would be consistent with behaviour at the end of hegemony, in this case US hegemony. The specific content of US foreign policy in President Trump’s administration is yet to be discerned at the time of writing, though the isolationist tone of some of his statements coupled with his withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership immediately after taking office may provide greater opportunity for China to take the lead in the political and economic integration of Asia. China’s representations of the MSRI and other global actions consistently deny any attempt to assume the role of hegemonic power. Instead, the MSRI is represented as a project that would boost world trade and benefit all the countries directly involved and the world economy in general.59 Interestingly, a comparison could be made with the United States between the two world wars and China’s promotion of the MSRI. In 1928, geographer and government advisor Isaiah Bowman began the preface to the fourth edition of his textbook The New World: Problems in Political Geography with these words: With a rapidly increasing rate of farm production in the United States and an even more rapid growth of city population bent on increasing industrial output and trade, the foreign commerce of the United States has grown to striking proportions. The process, though not new, has been greatly hastened in recent years. Since the beginning of the World War, the United States has increased its foreign investments fourfold, doubled its foreign commerce, and becomes the creditor of sixteen European nations. It was hardly an accident that the reparation problem was at least partly solved by the adoption of a plan of American origin.60 Thankfully without the spectre of a past global war, the internal economic development of China and the need to expand global trade to address problems of domestic over-production echo the connections made by Bowman. The emphasis upon global engagement promoted by Bowman was what Neil Smith called “first moment” in “American imperial assertion.”61 It was only later and without being pre-determined or, arguably, intentional, did the more militaristic “moments” of empire become clear.62 Global investment and trade require a physical presence to secure those investments and enable the operation of the global economy.63 Such actions are a combination of selfishness and altruism, in that conducting the military actions necessary for the operation of the global economy, such as the US military presence in the oil-rich Middle East, benefits one’s own economy through facilitating the operation of the global economy.64 A desire to promote global economic intercourse through the MSRI to facilitate continued domestic economic growth could be the initial steps towards what could be called “reluctant hegemony” as China gets drawn in to a series of security commitments to protect its citizens and assets. The current state of the literature and the framing of the MSRI within processes of hegemony prompt some bold questions. The essays in this special section make no claim or hold no ambition, to completely answer such questions as to the future global trajectory of Chinese power or whether the MSRI is ushering in a new geopolitical balance between territoriality and flows.65 However, the essays do provide empirical insight and fresh perspectives on the way the MSRI is emerging as a key geopolitical project at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The balance of M-T-M’ and T-M-T’ strategies in the ongoing development of the MSRI suggests that the project is perhaps neither stuck in a past of the primacy of territorial politics or a harbinger of a future of the geopolitics of flows. Rather, the MSRI is a contemporary expression of a constant geopolitics between territorial and network imaginations and practices.66 Hence, the collection of essays does provide insight in to the relative balance of territorial imperatives and economic goals, and the related possibilities of conflict and cooperation.

Overview of the Papers Jean-Marc F. Blanchard’s article, “Probing China’s Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative,” undertakes a comprehensive review of the literature on the MSRI to uncover the narratives used to represent and justify this scheme, shed light on the interaction of political and economic actors and dynamics at multiple levels (e.g. regional, national and sub-national) and identify a number of the political and economic challenges emanating from state and non-state actors that will influence China’s massive geopolitical endeavour. His essay reveals that China is advancing certain narratives (e.g. the MSRI is about economics or the MSRI is non-exclusionary) designed to promote embrace of the MSRI as well as to address counter narratives (e.g. the MSRI is about politics or the MSRI is designed to create anew a China-centric order) that may lead to a backlash or hinder the MSRI from reaching its full potential.67 Blanchard’s evaluation of the literature supports the general argument of the special section, namely that the MSRI should be seen as a process transforming the global geopolitical landscape, a process where politics and economics are interactive, support one another (at least from the Chinese vantage point) and entail multiform interactions at multiple levels. David Brewster’s piece, “Silk Roads and Strings of Pearls,” cuts into the MSRI from a perspective that emphasises the political/strategic narrative of the MSRI. Brewster describes the transformative nature of the MSRI, building upon the geopolitical tradition of analysing the world through a dichotomy of landpowers and seapowers.68 Brewster provides a rich history of efforts to control the Indian Ocean Region and explains why territory has served to isolate Eurasian land powers like China from the Indian Ocean Region. However, as Brewster notes, we may be on the verge of a historical change because the MSRI and its associated projects, especially infrastructure projects, have the potential to alter the historic division between the Indian Ocean and the Eurasian landmass or, in terms familiar to geopolitics specialists, the link between power and space. Hence, the MSRI can be seen as a contemporary example of the way that expansive infrastructure projects are forms of geopolitical activity that transform the context for ongoing and future geopolitical decisions. Of course, as Brewster reports, China has been at pains to counter the narrative that its MSRI, port projects and naval activities in the Indian Ocean Region have any strategic or military design. Moreover, regardless of China’s objectives, there are a variety of military, political, economic and geographic factors that will mitigate the transformative potential of the MSRI in the Indian Ocean Region. Even so, dramatic changes may be underfoot. Amitendu Palit’s contribution, “India’s Economic and Strategic Perceptions of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative,” looks at the MSRI through more economic lenses, though it is cognizant of geopolitics. Palit’s essay highlights a particular geographic construction that is the essence of the MSRI, the economic corridor. A particular form of “spatial fix,” an economic corridor is a geographic entity that connects cities, sub-national regions and countries to form a vast set of hinterlands.69 Palit points out that the various states and cities that comprise the MSRI display a wide spectrum of heterogeneity in terms of their economic efficiency and infrastructure quality. These differences will affect their perceptions of and ability to participate in and contribute to the MSRI. In India’s specific case, “Chinese” economic corridors linked to the MSRI will compete with some of the economic arrangements of which it is a part, while India’s economic shortcomings (e.g. bureaucratic and physical impediments to the flows of goods) mean that it will be limited in profiting fully from the MSRI. This will only compound the anxieties that already exit about the MSRI due to issues highlighted in Palit and Brewster’s separate studies. Ultimately, the likelihood the MSRI will work as planned depends on the extent to which state and non-state actors embrace the MSRI and enact political and economic decisions supportive of it. Palit’s analysis further demonstrates how politics and economics interact and how on the ground realities shape narratives and narratives shape these realities. In “Chinese Capitalism and the Maritime Silk Road,” the final paper of the collection, Xin Zhang situates the narratives and decisions discussed in the preceding contributions within the broader contextual framework of world-systems analysis. In contrast to those who highlight shifts in global power structures as determinative of Chinese foreign policy behaviours, Zhang identifies the MSRI as a strategy of China as a semi-peripheral country within a particular moment of the dynamics of the capitalist world-economy whose economic model, extensively detailed in Zhang’s article, has reached a point of exhaustion. Economic issues such as overproduction, a declining return on capital coupled with excess reliance on capital investment, and rising labour costs have spurred a number of “outward oriented” policies, in which both state and non-state actors play a role, of which the MSRI is yet but another manifestation. The MSRI, then, can be seen as a contemporary example of strategies that have occurred throughout history that combines Arrighi’s territorial and economic logics to create global economic linkages for, ostensibly, domestic needs.70 However, Zhang also points out that the particular nature of China’s “hybrid” form of capitalism may give the MSRI a unique geopolitical form.