Understanding Sub-State’s Agency in Regionalism: The Case of Yunnan in Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Initiative

SNGs in the Regionalism Discourse

Between the long journey of ‘old’ and ‘new’, regionalism literature addresses a few themes for theoretical conceptualization. Questions such as what constitutes a region, what explains its emergence, who are the involved actors, and how they are related to the other levels of state and the international system are central. A particular discipline’s ontological and epistemological views drive how the discussion on the region, regionalism, and regionalization is undertaken with few conversations with each other. Structural, political, and institution-centric regionalism is constantly pitted against fluid interactions to intensify the dichotomies within the literature. This section primarily reviews the cross-border and sub-national regionalism literature and their representation of sub-state actors. It further brings insights from the enterprise of paradiplomacy and its theory of actorness to chart the analytical framework for analyzing Yunnan within BCIM.

To start, inspecting the often-repeated ritual of differentiating between regionalism and regionalization is essential (Gamble and Payne 2003: 43–62; Huges 2000). To clarify the concepts, ‘regionalism’ is often viewed as a state-led process, whereas ‘regionalization’ becomes the purview of non-state actors such as business networks or people-to-people cultural ties. While this categorization does accept the diversity of forces working in world politics, it represents the Western liberal bias of treating the market and society as separate from the state and privileging one over another. Also, it cannot represent the role played by government institutions, sub-states, and local governments, whose reality lies in the intersection of these dualities (Bøås et al. 2003:197–210). The growing literature on SNG’s international outreach raises issues with this separate bracketing of the discourse. According to Hocking (2009: 17), the internationalization of provincial governments has been narrowly viewed and repeatedly located ‘within the traditional and increasingly uninformative categories of state and non-state actor rather than seeking to appreciate their defining characteristics’. In highlighting the role of Japan’s subnational governments in regional and international cooperation, Jain (2005: 14) attributes the shunning of sub-state actors to the sudden proliferation of new international actors, persisting cold-war psychology of upholding nation-state as the unitary player and the deliberate downplaying of the growing influence and importance of a ‘constituent’ government.

Despite their commitment to the post-positivist understanding of IR, such predispositions also become part of the ‘new regionalism’ discourse. Theoretically, the paradigm hinges on the region’s multi-dimensional, multi-scalar, and multi-actor representation to emphasize the constructed and produced nature of agency and spatiality. In doing so, it allows the sub-national and local actors a role in regional discourse and places their agency in the interlinked process at macro and micro levels. However, in practice, local governments have only received a passing acknowledgment of their role in border regions and states’ economic rescaling projects. Mittelman (1996: 189–213) sees the contemporary forms of sub-regions in Southeast Asia and South Africa as a vessel for the neoliberal agenda of states and international agencies. On the same page, Bremmer and Bailes (1998: 131–148) contextualize SNGs tangible economic activities as a ‘top-down’ push from the central authorities. In the case of Europe, multiple factors such as norms, supranational institutional governance, distributive policies of the nation-state, history, culture, and geography determine the development of cross-national networks (Scott 2002: 179–198; Wallace 2002: 137–149). The sub-states have received a relatively rare empirical endorsement. One finds a recurring trend of theoretical reference and empirical inattention to sub-states in regionalism literature.

As Asian sub-regionalism is distinguished from the European model in its orientation toward trade, production, and infrastructure, here also, the relationship between private market players and developmental state is prioritized on the backdrop of facilitating provincial actors and globalization (Katzenstein 2000; Peng 2002: 423–447; Stubbs 2012: 90–100). A few scholars, such as Ngai-Ling Sum, Katsuhiro Sasuga, and David Arase, surpassed this barrier to empirically situate the agency of sub-state authority in the Greater China production network and Japan sea regionalism. Ngai-Ling Sum introduced the concept of ‘strategy’ in rethinking the relationship between structure and agency. It provided local and central authorities equal seating as ‘initiators’ and ‘strategic planners’ in molding the regional structure of ‘embedded exportism’ in the Greater China growth triangle (Sum 2002: 50–76). In his work titled Microregionalism and Governance in East Asia, Sasuga (2004) explicitly investigates the sub-provincial (city) and sub-municipal (township) levels of China’s Guangdong province to demonstrate the ‘embedded’ international production system in the province. Arase (2002: 176–190) also provides similar insights into the informal and decentralized cooperation of sub-national actors in the Japan Sea Regionalism process involving plains, plateaus, river basins, the littoral regions, coast, and archipelago in China, Mongolia, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, respectively.

This agency of sub-state actors is constantly recognized in diplomatic studies encompassing cases across Africa, the Americas, China, Europe, India, Russia, Southeast Asia, and more. The earlier understanding of the federal political system being the bedrock of provincial diplomacy (Duchcek 1984: 5–31; Soldatos 2001: 34–53) has transformed into a more comprehensive framework incorporating the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon. The multiple explanations are organized under the broader questions of ‘causality’, ‘motives’, ‘legality’, ‘institutions’, ‘center’s outlook’, and ‘consequences’ (Kuznetsov 2015: 100–119). Carnago (2010: 11–36) particularly places such ‘normalization’ of sub-state activeness in both the top-down and bottom-up dialectics and identifies four venues of the process: a) In generalization, that is, the worldwide practice and institutionalization of the sub-state diplomacy across political systems; b) In regionalization, that is, forging a balance between local government diplomatic innovation and the state transformation in the changing regional and global context; c) In reflective adaptation: the capacity to seize the opportunity structures based on policies and diplomatic arena and adopt the change and; lastly d) in the legal and institutional mechanism of central government accepting the internal division of power and authority among the orders of governments.

Hocking (2009: 17–39) goes a step further and provides a standard of international actorness that ‘privileges’ SNGs capacity to pursue ‘foreign policy’ and reflects on their nature and qualities to act internationally. These five dimensions include: a) aims and motivations, b) the extent and direction of involvement, c) structures and resources, d) level of participation, and e) strategies (Table 1). According to him, as sub-state ‘actorness’ is mainly positioned among the range of factors and the web of complex multilayered policy environments, it is essential to understand the ‘qualities’, ‘motives’, ‘extent’, and ‘forms’ of sub-state governance. A sub-state agency could be contextualized and universalized based on combinations of these dimensions while avoiding deterministic causal relationships. Hocking’s understanding of agency goes beyond the intrinsic characteristics of an entity; it embeds sub-state agency in networks of process and links with other entities.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Brian Hocking’s Framework of Sub-state ‘Actorness’.

Criteria of International ‘Actorness’
1	Aims and motivations	Product of domestic-international interface. Can be initiators, channels, or targets of international activity
2	Extent and direction of involvement	Developed structures and procedures at both international and national levels through local and national interests.Represents continuity of involvement, the scope of issues (high politics/ low politics)
3	Structure and resources	Material as well as policy-relevant knowledge and expertise resources Sovereignty-based legitimacy and expertise-based legitimacy
4	Levels of participation	Variety of networks such as governmental and inter-governmental, regional arrangements
5	Strategies	Mediatory Route and Primary Route Establishes effective communication and division of labor in terms of functions and responsibilities between central and local government

Source: Adapted from Hocking (2009).

Incorporating similar insights, Liu and Song (2020) presented their ‘actorness’ framework to critically reflect on Chinese paradiplomacy discourse, whose attention is skewed toward center-state dynamics as an explanatory factor. Some scholars see Chinese provinces as implementers of Beijing’s instructions; for some, they are its partners and comrades (Chung 2016; Jian et al. 2010; Liu and Song 2020: 8; Summers 2013). In their analysis of Yunnan, they forward four dimensions: motivation, opportunity, capability, and presence; all intimately related and mutually constituted; to detail the province’s recognition in surrounding regional countries and cross-border regional arrangements as an actor (Liu and Song 2019: 1–36). An external conducive environment is as necessary as the motivation to engage and utilize instruments to be an engaging actor.

The paper draws upon Hocking’s framework to note that the Yunnan agency in the regional setting should be understood as acquired rather than static. Prompted by the domestic-foreign interface in China’s economic development, Yunnan gained the capacity to ‘initiate’ a regional framework as the representative of the center and party and as a strategic policy entrepreneur and innovator. As an impoverished border province, it mobilized its material and policy-relevant knowledge and expertise resources to develop new solutions. It broke the idea to policy-relevant actors across the regional space. As a ‘repository of shared sovereignty’, it grabbed the window of opportunity and its geographical proximity to act as an ‘initiator’ to couple local and regional problems and needs. The following section presents the conceptualization of BCIM as the extension of Yunnan’s motivations, knowledge resources, and repurposing of Beijing’s ‘opening-up’. However, it also highlights the transition in Kunming’s role as no more than a ‘channel’ to the Party-state, pointing to the limits of sub-state agency in a regional enterprise. Though Yunnan is able to maintain its discursive role in the BCIM debate, it has yet to have a mediatory agency to bring BCIM to an end with respect to bilateral tension between India and China. Thus, this study incorporates the notion of sub-state ‘actorness’ with the ‘process’ of regionalism to better reflect the dynamic nature of sub-state agency within stages of a particular regional project. Contextualized in the interconnectedness of domestic, regional, and bilateral contexts, the sub-state is observed to acquire the power to repurpose and redefine a region based on its economic and social development needs at early stages but was eventually outdistanced from the process as the decisions matured to hold strategic gravity.

Yunnan: The Initiator

The BCIM region is historically known to be a part of the thriving southern Asian trade routes along with the ancient Silk Road. The connections within the geography of the region predate the Westphalian settings. The individual tribes along the frontiers of the Chinese empire maintained their political and economic autonomy. They functioned as the bustling interaction zone between Chinese and other civilizations to its west. The earliest Chinese historical sources establish that the king of the Dian Kingdom, that is, the region around present-day Kunming, purposely ‘forbade’ the envoy of the Han emperor to go further west, that is, the Indian civilization to ‘keep his monopoly over a highly lucrative trade route’ (Thakur 2019: 102). The trade route is now well-established as a South-west route of the broader Silk Road, which was neither Sino-centric nor was an actual ‘road’; but ‘a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of “deserts and mountains” converging in “oasis towns,” and “semi-independent city-states”’ (Hansen 2012: 5). With his Yunnan-centered historical research, Bin Yang establishes that the geopolitical positioning of Yunnan allowed it to be at the junction of the four routes comprising the South-west Silk Road maintaining ‘transnational, cross-boundary, or cross-regional interactions’ (Brose 2010: 306). As detailed by him (Yang 2004: 281–322):

The first (route) links Sichuan and Yunnan to India, via Burma. It is called the Road of Chuan-Dian-Mian-Yin (Sichuan–Yunnan–Burma–India) or of Shu-Yandu (Sichuan–India) by the Chinese. Because of its enormous significance, scholars sometimes identify it with the Southern Silk Route (SSR). However, other roads also contribute to the formation and function of the SSR. One connects Vietnam with Yunnan; one connects Yunnan with Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia; another is from Yunnan, sometimes via Sichuan, to Tibet and India. (Yang 2004: 286)

The horses and silver were the local contributions of Yunnan to this route. They were later acclaimed to have shaped the regional politics of frontier areas of Bengal, that is the current-day state of West Bengal in India and contributed eminently to its economic stability (Yang 2012: 125–145). In the more recent past, geography served as a strategic ‘communication link’ between British India and China during the Second World War, when Japanese forces got hold of the Burma road. Yikun and Wei (2005) write that tons of goods and thousands of people were airlifted from China to India between June 1942 to September 1945 via the ‘Hump Air Route’ between Assam (India) to Kunming (Yunnan). Besides the air route, the construction of ‘Stillwell Road’ from Ledo in Assam to Kunming via Burma and the oil pipeline between Calcutta (India) to Kunming gave allied forces the needed strategic control on the China–India–Burma theatre (Yikun and Wei 2005).

The provincial government and affiliated think tanks have long incentivized such historical knowledge of Yunnan as a transitional space to redefine Yunnan’s position from a ‘frontier’ province to a ‘Bridgehead (橋頭堡)’ province. Since the opening up of the Chinese economy in the 1980s, transforming Yunnan’s economic status from a ‘peripheral economy’ to a ‘regional economy’ has been the frontline approach toward regional connections. The initial direction of the economic reforms tended to prioritize national economic competitiveness over the regional balance making the central funding a competitive exercise for the provincial governments. Side-lined western provinces such as Yunnan pushed to carve their local measures and policies to garner internal and external capital attention (Goodman 1994: 1–20). Against the background of mending India–China relations since the 1965 war, a politically stable neighborhood in Southeast Asia, and Deng Xiaoping’s new focus on Western development, Yunnan in the 1990s ambitiously positioned itself in the regional economy (Summers 2012: 445–459). It aimed to have a two-fold opening up, one towards its surrounding provinces and coastal regions in China and the other towards the markets of south and southeast Asia, modeling Kunming as a key city and border cities as trading points (Zhu 2008).

Under governor He Zhiqiang (和志強), a statesman belonging to the Naxi ethnicity of the province, Yunnan focused on its pillar industries and infrastructure development and prioritized foreign trade and reaching out to overseas and border countries via sending and hosting foreign delegations (Zhao 1998: 342). He confidently reiterated to ‘exploit the geographical advantage of Yunnan to open markets in the Asia-Pacific region (and) to develop large-scale trade and border trade simultaneously’ (D’Hooghe 1994: 300). It is worth highlighting that Yunnan became one of the earliest Chinese provinces ever to be a part of regional economic cooperation (Lu 2013: 103–118). It actively negotiated its participation in Asian Development Bank’s proposed GMS, both geographically and managerially, in the 1990s. In manifesting what Minjiang Li calls ‘local liberalism’, that is, provincial activism under the broad outline of Centre government policies, the Yunnan government proposed ‘opening the Southern gate and engaging the Asia-pacific’ policy in its 8th Five-Year Plan (1991–1995) (Li 2014: 277).

A 1992 work by chief editor Che Zhimin, who later played an essential role in proposing the framework of BCIM, also advised the Yunnan government to focus on the trans-border infrastructural linkages to the south and southeast Asia and beyond to tap the development potential of the province (Summers 2012: 445–459). As Summers (2012: 445–459) details, a group of researchers endorsed recognizing Yunnan as more than just an impasse, a nodal point to the most crucial route to the outside world. In the same year, both the State Council of China and the Provincial Government of Yunnan approved several technological and economic developmental zones across the border and within the province to kick-start its industrialization and promote trade between neighboring Countries (Guo 2013: 329–339). After initially experimenting with Southeast Asia, Che Zhimin, then Deputy Director of the Economic and Technological Research Centre of the Yunnan Provincial Government, floated the proposition of a growth quadrangle between Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar in 1998. The very next year, the idea was extended to fellow academicians and policy circles across the partner countries at the International Conference on Regional Economic Cooperation and Development jointly organized by the Yunnan provincial government and its affiliated research institute Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences (YASS) at Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan. As Uberoi (Report 2000) logged, the first international conference drew 134 delegates from Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar. The idea was well-received, and a consensus was reached to establish the Forum for Regional Cooperation to attract the active interest of government actors in the initiative at both central and provincial levels. It also encouraged the countries’ delegations to set up a non-official working group to lay out the ‘operational procedures for the functioning of the forum and its subsidiary organs, their structures, sources of funding, and other relevant matters within the agreed framework of regional cooperation’ (Report 2000: 424).

‘Kunming Initiative’ brought the first-of-its-kind consensus in the geographical area to deepen economic and cultural cooperation. Rooted in trade, infrastructure tourism, and communication connectivity, the initiative encouraged ‘the formulation of specific programs of actions’ and ‘the setting up of small working groups to review plans’. It called for the institutionalization of sub-regional cooperation ‘to concretely realize the vision of sub-regional cooperation among the four’ (Rangnathan 2001:119). From the very genesis, the provincial government’s aim to develop the Yunnan economy was at the center of the inception and propagation of BCIM cooperation. For Kunming, it was a very ‘natural’ choice; it was eager to elevate the cooperation to an institutionalized and official level (Interview II 2021). Considering the centralized nature of the Chinese state, it is convenient to presume the strategic positioning of Yunnan in BCIM regionalism. However, a detailed look at the process not only establishes the centrality of Yunnan policy entrepreneurship but also reflects Beijing’s manipulation of decentralization and recentralization to further its economic interests.

Since the signing, the initiative had the provincial government and its affiliated research institute YASS, as the frontline leaders. The Chinese delegation to the second, third, and fourth forums at New Delhi (2000), Bangladesh (2002) Myanmar (2003), respectively, was led by Yunnan’s vice-governor Shao Qiwei. In contrast, India and Bangladesh both were represented at the policy and research institutes level (Summers 2013). In this first phase of the BCIM, from 2001 to 2003, the participants from representative think tanks grounded the rationale of the initiative in the common developmental issues such as transportation connectivity, infrastructure, trade, tourism, and non-traditional security challenges of illegal immigration, drug trafficking (Deepak 2018: 51–68). With time not only did the scope of issues broaden, the number of participants enlarged, and its denomination was upgraded to the forum of regional economic cooperation. Yunnan officially upgraded its participation from track 1.5 to track 1 by associating Yunnan Foreign Affairs Office as one of the sponsors of the fifth forum round in Kunming (Summers 2013). The forum also agreed to tentatively establish a BCIM economic cooperation coordinate office in Kunming to assist the cultural, economic, and research-based exchanges among the members’ countries (Su 2012). Since 2002, GMS and BCIM regional arrangements have received more mention in Yunnan Provincial Yearbooks than the subject of economic cooperation of Yunnan with other Chinese provinces (Summers 2008: 68–77). Yunnan Statistical Yearbooks also added trade and tourism data concerning South Asia, especially India. Addressing local media, He Xuan, the deputy director of the Development Research Centre of the Provincial Government, boasted of Yunnan’s success in strengthening economic and trade exchanges with the member countries of BCIM and encouraged it to explore the plans for land connectivity along Beijing–Kunming–New Delhi Route (Sina 2004). He added that BCIM aligns with China’s long-term strategy of opening up, peaceful development, and the spirit of ‘South-South Cooperation’ (Sina 2004).

In further forum meetings, as the Bangladesh officials warmed up to an official-level evolution, Indian government representatives became more apparent in their unwillingness to formalize or institutionalize the forum (Deepak 2018: 51–68). The disinterest of the Indian government was not only apparent to the Indian participants; the Yunnan side equally questioned it as they highlighted the duality in India’s development approach towards its northeast region (Lin 2015: 8–17). Recollecting the thoughts, one of the Indian participants from the forum expressed in an email correspondence that Indian delegations to BCIM exchanges were ‘ostensibly’ Track-II. Retired bureaucrats ‘obviously’ acted as Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) man, but in a particular instance, they also ‘privately’ compelled Indian MLA from the Northeast not to speak (Interview I 2020). Within the north-east region of India, BCIM was seen as a panacea to the isolation and underdevelopment of the region, a step-in congruence with India’s ‘Look East Policy’ and the commitment made in the India–China Joint Declaration of 2006 to welcome linkages between the Indian States and Chinese provinces (Rana and Uberoi 2012). However, in the process, none of the forums was ever held in the northeastern states nor involved any active participation of people’s representatives from the region.

The conversation of a permanent sub-regional mechanism involving the strategic sensitivities around the border area provoked inter-departmental and inter-governmental insecurities and suspicions within the Indian establishment (Jacob 2012). Among the partner states, Bangladesh and Myanmar approached BCIM as an opportunity for smaller economies to tap the multifaceted potentials of the region (Uberoi 2009: 241–252), whereas India saw Yunnan as doing Beijing’s bidding to achieve more significant economic and strategic influence across its borders and neighborhood. It became a cumbersome task for the provincial representatives to persuade the Indian establishment out of its mindset throughout the eleven rotational meetings conducted from 1999 to 2011. Indian government never took an active interest in institutionalizing the BCIM forum or its agenda at the inter-governmental level as it directly affected its strategic positioning in important north-east India concerning China.

Yunnan: The Channel

BCIM is broadly understood to be strangled between two of its different institutional mechanisms: first, the initial conceptualization of a BCIM regional forum; a loose, multifaceted, and multi-actor economic and cultural cooperation; and second, the joint-study groups (JSG), a domain of the central government officials of representative states to discuss the new approach of economic corridor since 2013, prioritizing transport network connectivity among nodal points for economic growth in the region. The latter came into existence when India and China bilaterally redefined and reimagined the BCIM geography to serve the function of the economic corridor in a joint statement. During Premier Le Keqiang’s visit to India on May 2013, the two sides ‘agreed to consult the other parties with a view to establishing a JSG on strengthening connectivity in the BCIM region’ and ‘initiating the development of a BCIM Economic Corridor (BCIM-EC)’ (MEA 2013a). Whereas the Joint Statement during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to China in October 2013 further notified the establishment of a study group on the BCIM-EC in both countries and proposed the first BCIM JSG Meeting to discuss the evolution of the economic corridor (MEA 2013b).

The concept of the economic corridor was rarely explicitly discussed on the forum platform; it was merely ‘encompassed within the BCIM connectivity agenda’ (Uberoi 2016). But, the successful implementation of the BCIM Car Rally from Kolkata (India) to Kunming (Yunnan) via Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Mandalay (Myanmar) in the early months of 2013 ‘surprisingly’ earned the Indian government affirmation for the BCIM initiative. It ‘proved to be the wedge that prised open India’s reluctant endorsement of the BCIM sub-regional cooperation project’ (Uberoi 2016: 22). It was the highest achievement for Yunnan and the initiative as a regional mechanism in the socialization of states. BCIM-EC presented Yunnan with a much-longed-for ‘national strategy’ and ‘attention’ for its reaching out efforts since its official designation as China’s ‘bridge’ to the southwest in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011–2015). It raised its standing in the regional context against other provinces, such as Guangxi and the relatively competitive Sichuan.

A suggestion was floated in earlier years to expand the geographical scope of BCIM to include other surrounding southwestern provinces and municipalities, that is, Guizhou, Sichuan, Chongqing, Tibet, and Qinghai. Yunnan was seen as economically weak to be able to accelerate the development of its surrounding region by itself (Chen 2005: 8–15). The neighboring provinces have long competed for their lead agency in Southeast Asian diplomacy. In an online interview, a senior researcher commented that different provinces have the upper hand in different functions; they seek both competition and complementary relations with fellow provinces to enhance their economic outreach (Interview III 2021). Since 2004, Guangxi was favored to organize China-ASEAN Expo against Kunming; it was also admitted to GMS in 2005, depriving Yunnan of ‘its status as the sole Chinese representative’ in the mechanism (Liu and Song 2019: 13). Within Kunming, the new direction and confidence in the BCIM cooperation was seen as an upshot of persistent efforts of Yunnan-led delegations at the BCIM economic cooperation forum (Western Times 2013). Yunnan earned Beijing’s attention and confidence via the cooperation; but eventually lost its frontline leadership in the coming stages. Summers (2008: 68–77) established a similar shift in GMS; Yunnan officials were central to the regional arrangement meetings in the initial stages, but over time they have struggled to be in the executive position with the center’s growing attention in the region.

With the designation of the State Council’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as the nodal agency for the conduction of the JSG, Sun Xuegong, Deputy Director-General of NDRC’s Institute of Economic Research, was appointed as the focal point of contact in the first meeting of JSG conducted in Dec 2013. It was agreed that geographically the proposed Corridor ‘could (emphasized) run from Kunming (China) in the east to Kolkata (India) in the west, broadly spanning the region, including Mandalay (Myanmar), Dhaka, and Chittagong (Bangladesh) and other major cities and ports as key nodes’ (Embassy of India, Beijing 2013). Also, principally it should value ‘mutual trust and respect, mutual interest, equitable sharing of mutual benefits, pragmatism, effectiveness, consensus-building and securing win-win outcomes’ (Embassy of India, Beijing 2013). Before the final report of the JSG could be adopted in the third meeting, in the parallel development, BCIM-EC was amalgamated under the newly appointed Chinese president’s ambitious vision of One Belt One Road (OBOR) for 21st-century China.

Formally announced by Xi Jinping in 2013 and later detailed by NDRC in 2015, OBOR indented to revive the ‘Silk Road Spirit’ by transmitting Chinese investment towards infrastructure development and economic connectivity towards the land and maritime channels across the Asian, African, and European continents. The NDRC document titled Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-century Maritime Silk Road highlighted that the initiative would focus on ‘jointly building a new Eurasian Land Bridge and developing China–Mongolia–Russia, China–Central Asia–West Asia and China–Indochina Peninsula economic corridors’. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the BCIM-EC in South Asia were designated to be ‘closely related’ to the initiative (NDRC 2015). The initially decentralized nature of BCIM cooperation transformed into a centrally-administrated and centrally-designated assignment to Yunnan, where it was further nudged to utilize its geographical advantage to accelerate connectivity with neighbor countries and be the ‘pivot of China’s opening up to South and Southeast Asia’ under the new Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (NDRC 2015).

At this stage, Yunnan’s paradiplomacy towards South Asia reaped the ultimate ‘inward-centered’ aim of successfully ‘differentiating’ Yunnan from other equally underdeveloped and capital-lacking provinces in western China (Tubilewicz 2017: 931–949), but in the further development, the centralization jeopardized the BCIM initiative itself. The clubbing of CPEC with BCIM-EC under BRI agitated the Indian government as the geographical outline of the former runs through the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir and outrightly disregards India’s sovereignty. MEA strongly voiced its opposition to the BRI initiative by registering that ‘connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity’ and they ‘must be based on universally recognized international norms, good governance, the rule of law, openness, transparency and equality’ (MEA 2017).

As the controversial BRI became the central point of discussion, BCIM-EC and BCIM forums both became increasingly moot. The last meeting of JSG was conducted in April 2017 with no substantial progress. In 2018 at the South-Asia Expo in Kunming, Minister of State for External Affairs Gen (Retd) V K Singh repeated the same rhetoric of the centrality of West Bengal in the revival of connection with Yunnan without any commitment towards the BCIM (The Economic Times 2018). To break the stalemate, the revival of the now side-lined mechanism of the BCIM forum was also attempted with a 13th meeting (2019) in Kunming on BCIM cooperation’s 20th anniversary with no progress in sight (Chaudhury 2019). One can also find a clear distinction between the Yunnan-centered analysis of the impasse, which acknowledges Indian concerns about its northeastern region, rising border tension, and China’s geopolitical influence. It advises China to build a political consensus to make up for economic and physical connectivity (Luo and Nie 2018: 117–149). In contrast, Beijing-based critics have boldly accused India of stalling the process with its ‘rigid thinking’ and harming Bangladesh and Myanmar’s interests (Liu 2019).

Even though BCIM-EC predates the BRI initiative, its association with the CPEC represents China’s affinity towards strategic interference in the neighborhood. It solidifies the lingering mistrust between New Delhi and Beijing. Indian External Affairs Minister has admitted to the difficulty of restoring normalcy in the bilateral relations and stated that ‘the relationship cannot be normal, if the situation in the border areas is abnormal’ (MEA 2022). With rising Chinese debts in the neighborhood, he has also cautioned fellow developing states to be ‘prudent’, ‘do their due diligence’, and make ‘informed decisions’ about lucrative infrastructure investments (Munich Security Conference 2022). Yunnan’s original direction of formalization and institutionalization of the BCIM regionalization within these regional power dynamics has struggled.

Yunnan has no standing to play a mediator at this stage, yet it has maintained its role as a channel and steadily socialized itself in the BCIM region. Since BCIM’s inception, Kunming has multiplied its interaction with South Asia through the successful platforms of the China–South Asia Expo and China–South Asia Business Forum China–South Asia Cooperation Forum, organized by the provincial government. It has enhanced air connectivity between Kunming–Kolkata, Kunming–Dhaka, Kunming–Yangon and Kunming–Mandalay routes (Deepak 2018: 57–58) and especially ‘trailblazed’ infrastructure and energy projects with Myanmar despite Sino-Myanmar cross-border tensions (Wong 2018: 735–757). Regarding trade, Bangladesh became the second-largest trading partner of Yunnan in South Asia, and Yunnan’s export to India and Bangladesh has exponentially increased since 2005. Based on the Yunnan Statistical Yearbook (2007–2019), Yunnan’s export to India has increased from 32 million in 2005 to 690 million in 2018 and Bangladesh from 73 million in 2005 to 148 million in 2018, and the number of tourists from India to Yunnan has increased by about 80% in last 10 years.

In the broader context, the southwestern province is more integrated with its Southeast Asian neighbors than its South Asian counterparts. Yet, its success in broadening its footprints in the latter’s social and economic dynamics via BCIM conceptualization cannot be denied. The contemporary recentralization of BCIM on China’s part is particularly reminiscent of its dynamics with Yunnan in the GMS after the plans for the economic corridor were approved in the eighth GMS ministerial conference. Tubilewicz (2017: 939) highlights, ‘Beijing was particularly interested in developing the Northern Economic Corridor (linking Yunnan with Laos and Thailand)’, so it actively ratified the plan, signed the required memorandums of understanding and co-funded the Laotian government’s infrastructure project to accelerate Yunnan’s connectivity. Even in the center’s decentralization scheme, provinces had ‘conditional’ autonomy, power over local resources, and more leeway in daily decision-making (Hess 2020: 84). Thus, the sub-state agency within regionalization is complexly situated within the dialectics of its ambitions, policy craftsmanship, degree of decentralization and member-state dynamics. The case study of BCIM additionally magnifies mutual trust and amiable member-state relations as sacrosanct for sub-state objectives to be manifested in a sub-regional framework. Sub-states may not be independent actors, but that does not restrict them from acquiring agency in varying contexts and capturing agency that imagines, defines, and reshapes regional arrangements and institutions (Glassman 2010: 8).

Conclusion

As discussed before, the objective of the paper was to empirically explore the relationship between sub-state agency and the phenomenon of regionalism. With the case of Yunnan within the BCIM initiative, it is asserted that sub-states are essential agents in imagining and driving regionalism processes with their political, social, and ideational leadership. In this particular case, the Yunnan government and its institutions reinvented their geographical and historical advantages to initiate a regional forum to establish a state-led regional institution. Not only does it maintained a keen interest in institutionalizing and formalizing the region, it actively postured itself to be the best candidate vis-à-vis neighboring provinces to assist China in furthering its economic ambitions within South Asia. Reproducing sovereignty-based and knowledge-based legitimacy, Yunnan leadership instrumentalized its regional policy to promote its economic, political, and cultural socialization within its South-Asian neighbors and enticed Chinese and foreign capital towards itself. The policy decisions of introducing a market economy, economic decentralization, and the ‘opening up’ of the 1980s within the Chinese state emboldened provincial actors to envision the scope of their economic and social diplomacy within the broader national framework. For Yunnan, economic sub-regionalism served as an experimental course of action.

In the larger context, the provincial is attributed a background and supportive role in the regionalism process. However, the focus on the BCIM process highlights that it is firmly placed in a dialogical relationship. They can direct, initiate and nudge the regionalization process by themselves but can also be controlled and commanded in the dynamic space and time. Within the informal exchanges, Yunnan maintained the front seat in reinvigorating regional identity, facilitating an environment for the creation of regional space, and nourishing regularized interactions and communities of practice; while in the further tweaking of regional strategy, it was absorbed by the central government and its construction of the region. The paper also establishes the bilateral dynamics of participant states as an essential factor in aiding sub-state economic diplomacy and its stature within the center-state relation. The geostrategic stakes in the geography of BCIM are higher based on the persisting political mistrust between the two major building blocks of the region.

Regarding sovereignty disputes, borders remain more constraining than enabling for sub-states; they need help to push their agenda forward and remain vulnerable to the vicissitudes of bilateral relations and centralization. In the interrelated context of globalization, the opening up, and economic decentralization, the sub-state acquires a degree of autonomy from both the external environment and internal constituents. However, such autonomy is never mutually exclusive; it sits in the synchronization between them. Thus, sub-states, whose agencies are enabled, sustained, or restricted by the constellations of factors and their interactions at global, regional, and local levels, are essential units to reproduce regions in international politics.