Seeing China's Belt and Road

Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China's Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different "downstream" contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China's Belt and Road shows the BRI's dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China's rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.

Edward Schatz is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Centre for the European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. He is the author of Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia (2021), Modern Clan Politics (2004), as well as the editor of Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009).

Rachel Silvey is Professor of Geography and Planning and Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her work has been published in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development studies. Her research has focused on migration, gender, and development in Indonesia, as well as Southeast Asian migration to the Gulf States and North America. She is currently researching labor migration associated with BRI projects in South East Asia, as well as the migration regimes associated with the expansion of plantations in South East Asia.

Introduction: Seeing the BRI
Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey

Part 1: Seeing China's Infrastructural Power
1. Securing the Belt and Road and Establishing Hierarchy in Central Asia
Edward Lemon and Bradley Jardine
2. Official Lending, Optics, and Outliers: Chinese Debt and the Belt and Road Initiative after COVID-19
Tom Narins
3. Conceptualizing the BRI: Complex Bilateralism in Theory and Practice
Jeremy Paltiel and Karl Yan

Part 2: Seeing Exhibits, Maps, and Corridors
4. China and the Visual Politics of World Order
Marina Kaneti
5. The Power of Blank Spaces: A Critical Cartography of China's Belt and Road Initiative in the Himalaya Region
Galen Murton
6. Behind the Spectacle of the Belt and Road Initiative: Corridor Perspectives, Visibility, and a Politics of Sight
Jessica DiCarlo

Part 3: Seeing Connectivity, Privacy, and Labor
7. Prefiguring China's Digital Silk Road to Europe: Connecting Switzerland
Lena Kaufmann
8. Keeping Watch along the Digital Silk Road: CCTV Surveillance and Central Asians' Right to Privacy
Jasmin Dall'Agnola
9. Labor Migration Pathways under the BRI: A Case Study of Chinese Expatriates in Ethiopia
Ding Fei

Conclusion: Looking Downstream
Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey