Discourse as infrastructure: How “New Infrastructure” policies re-infrastructure China (original) (raw)
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Despite China's leading role in the construction of infrastructure over the past decades, the most influential paradigms for the study of infrastructure in the social sciences originate from research conducted elsewhere. This introduction to the special section “Chinese Infrastructure: Techno-politics, Materialities, Legacies” seeks to address this apparent gap, and contributes to building an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China studies field. To do so, it pushes forward an understanding of infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions. We draw from two strands of inquiry: recent efforts to rethink the materiality of infrastructures not as an inert or stable basis upon which more dynamic social processes emerge, but rather as unstable assemblages of human and non-human agencies; and scholarship that explores the often hidden (techno-)political dimensions of infra...
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Despite widespread recognition of the problems caused by relying on engineering approaches to water management issues, since 2000 China has raised its commitment to a concrete-heavy approach to water management. While, historically, China’s embrace of modernist water management could be understood as part of a broader set of ideas about controlling nature, in the post-reform era this philosophical view has merged with a technocratic vision of national development. In the past two decades, a Chinese Water Machine has coalesced: the institutional embodiment of China’s commitment to large infrastructure. The technocratic vision of the political and economic elite at the helm of this Machine has been manifest in the form of some of the world’s largest water infrastructure projects, including the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Transfer Project, and in the exporting of China’s vision of concrete-heavy development beyond its own borders. This paper argues that China’s approach ...
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In contemporary China, there are two cartographies that underlie geographical imaginations of China’s political, economic, and cultural nature. The first is the geobody, a bordered notion of the state that stresses national territorial integrity and draws attention to historical territorial transgressions. The second is the civilization-state, a cartography that stresses extensive civilizational connection over national borders and which draws from China’s ancient cosmopolitan heritage and projected developmental future. This article analyzes the cartographies and attendant discourses of the geobody and civilization-state as iconic representations that speak to different ontologies of China. Analyzing China’s double body reveals two drastically different expectations about borders and infrastructure connectivity. Today and in the early years of the Chinese nation, maps of China’s internal railway network have supported nationalist calls for territorial security and promoted the idea of the Chinese geobody. Contemporary maps of the civilization-state, however, stress an unbounded China looking to enrich its neighbors through cultural exchange, road and railway expansion, and Belt and Road Initiative infrastructural connection. This article argues that these cartographies are not reducible to one another and that geographers should take seriously the affective work of maps beyond that of the geobody in critical geopolitical analysis.
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International Affairs, 2020
China’s increasing material capabilities stand at the heart of the US-China power transition debate. The focus on material power reflects a realist definition of power based on the possession of resources. However, material capabilities do not necessarily translate into influence and do not always determine outcomes. Non-material power matters at least as much as material capabilities. This paper argues that China under President Xi Jinping views power differently from previous generations of Chinese leaders. While material power remains important, Xi has paid greater attention to strengthening Chinese non-material power, specifically structural power and discursive power. This paper examines Chinese structural and discursive power, the third and fourth faces of power, through the lens of Xi’s mega-infrastructure vision, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It argues that power, both material and non-material, is embedded in infrastructure. Chinese structural and discursive power are amply demonstrated in the projects under the BRI. Specifically, the paper uses case studies of Chinese construction of high-speed railways in Laos and Indonesia to illustrate the effects of Chinese structural and discursive power. The cases show that China is relatively successful in wielding structural and discursive power in Laos and Indonesia, despite the differences in the two countries’ political systems, and economic and population size. Exploring the different facets of Chinese power is critical for a proper understanding of how China strives to shape the structure and discourse of the global order.
Introduction: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments
Introduction to special issue on "Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments", 2016
Infrastructures have conventionally been viewed as material substrates underlying social action. On this basis, cultural anthropology has engaged infrastructure as vehicles through which political values and symbols are made manifest. In contrast, this introduction, and the contributions that follow, specifies an orientation to infrastructures as ontological experiments. At issue is a view of infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate a multiplicity of disjunctive elements and spin out new relations between them. The result is the creation and transformation of different forms of practical, materialized ontologies, which give shape to culture, society, and politics. Given that these transformations are often slow and incremental, they often unfold under the radar of anthropological analysis. However, we argue that it is important for the anthropology of infrastructure to find ways of bringing their world-changing capacities into view. The paper ends with a brief introduction to the contributions of the special issue.
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Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia, 2022
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China's 13th Five-Year Plan (FYP) is the first chance for the Xi-Li administration, which assumed leadership at the 18th Party Congress, to solidify a new course. Notably, ICT is the highest priority sector in the 13th FYP. This article highlights the ascent of the Internet in China's national strategy. It illustrates why and how ICT development— accelerated by the spread of high-speed Internet—is tasked to underpin China's rise as a global power and its internal transformation. More important, drawing on the geopolitical economy approach that emphasizes the economic roles of states in sustaining and animating the capitalist world order on the one hand, and the digital capitalism literature that deems the political economy of ICT as an increasingly primary dimension of global capitalism on the other, this article sets up a conceptual framework for interpreting this key policy document and China's ICT policy in general.
2019
The aim of this paper is to unveil the main cultural patterns adopted by the Chinese leadership to project smart power abroad, and to provide a new perspective on the claims by Chinese scholars and politicians who argue that a new paradigm in international relations is being promoted by Beijing. Principles as "inclusiveness", "win-win cooperation", "peaceful rise", "harmonious world" – often raised in relation with China's vision for a new global order and its flagship policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – are part of a new narrative which cannot replace, for instance, fundamental issues as a clear regulatory framework needed for enterprises willing to participate in BRI-related infrastructural and energy projects. The lack of a clear legal framework is at the moment one of the most important problem hindering foreign firms' ability to invest and grow within the China-led initiative. The importance of this study rests on the nec...
2017
The aim of this paper is to unveil the main cultural patterns adopted by the Chinese leadership to project smart power abroad, and to provide a new perspective on the claims by Chinese scholars and politicians who argue that a new paradigm in international relations is being promoted by Beijing. Principles as "inclusiveness", "in-win cooperation", "peaceful rise", "harmonious world" - often raised in relation with China's vision for a new global order and its flagship policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - are part of a new narrative which cannot replace, for instance, fundamental issues as a clear regulatory framework needed for enterprises willing to participate in BRI-related infrastructural and energy projects. The lack of a clear legal framework is at the moment one of the most important problem hindering foreign firms' ability to invest and grow within the China-led initiative. The importance of this study rests on the nece...