Silk Roads and cultural routes (original) (raw)

Belt and Road is a project in both writing and reading history. To date, international scrutiny has fallen overwhelmingly on the former; how China’s grand ambitions are altering the course of events and the global power landscape of the twenty-first century. But if the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is about “reviving” the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, we might also ask how China now reads the past, and in what ways it appropriates it for strategic ends. Such lines of inquiry help us begin to understand how Belt and Road not just writes, but comes to re-write history, and it is the latter that may hold the greatest long-term impact. From the very beginning, Beijing has framed Belt and Road as a “revival” of the Silk Roads. But what this means precisely has received little critical attention in the West. Journalists and analysts have noted the Silk Road as little more than a gesture to romantic pasts of trade and exchange, where the camel trails and caravanserai of previous centuries are replaced by transcontinental rail lines and special economic zones. Sailing ships carrying porcelain become the container ships and oil tankers of the twenty-first century. History then is merely a palette of richly evocative imagery through which the old is paralleled with the new to make strategies of connectivity meaningful for audiences around the world. Countless news channels, think tanks, government reports, and academic papers have thus introduced BRI by casually summarizing the Silk Road in a short sentence or two, and rapidly moving on to the “real” stuff.