Belts and roads every- and nowhere: Conceptualizing infrastructural corridorization in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the Maritime Silk Road Initiative by framing it not as a static, state-centric device to channel Chinese developmental ambitions, but by emphasizing the flexible character of its production and the provisional configuration of its materialization. It draws on assemblage theory as a conceptual angle to, on the one hand, focus on the agentive character of human and non-human ‘actors’ such as ‘traveling’ discourses of development or infrastructures to explore Maritime Silk Road Initiative’s materialization ‘on the ground’ in its emergent rather than resultant way, on the other.

Introduction

This article asks how the current materialization of the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) along the Indian Ocean can be conceptualized in socio-spatial terms based on reviews of major policy documents and on a discourse analysis of media content with a focus on Chinese-funded port development in Sri Lanka. I argue against propositions to grasp the MSRI as a spatially fixed (Summers, 2016) or networked (Liu and Dunford, 2016) device to enforce mutual connectivity between urban nodes along the Indian Ocean. In line with the notion of the BRI as a political technology forging new social and economic assemblages (Karrar and Mostowlansky, this set), it is suggested to analyse the MSRI as a vision through which the rationalism of Chinese modernity is produced, but whose materialization ‘on the ground’ is also shaped by the (socio-spatial, discursive) re-positioning of (trans-) local actors. Thus, the circulation of a particular vision of Chinese development that comes with the promise of MSRI in improving mutual connectivity and fostering integration, on the one hand, is likely to transform the materiality of places like port cities as well as livelihoods along the Indian Ocean. By using assemblage theory as a conceptual angle for scrutinizing the MSRI, on the other, I emphasize that interconnections and flows of human and non-human actors between places along what is framed as the MSRI are often provisionary, which is likely to have long-term, local-to-regional consequences for Chinese claims of win-win development.

Flexible corridorization along the Indian Ocean and beyond

Given the strained relations between the Chinese leadership and many of the Southeast and South Asian governments over maritime claims, it is perhaps not surprising that official directives formulating a framework for implementing the MSRI on the ground have remained deliberately vague (Summers, 2016: 2). The ‘Vision for Maritime Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative’, issued in June 2017, framed the MSRI as an important instrument for joint action in building a blue economy. It suggests, first, establishing cooperation platforms promoting ‘green development, ocean-based prosperity, maritime security, innovative growth and collaborative governance’ (NDRC, 2017). Second, in order to deepen cooperation, it proposes to build so-called blue economic passages along the South Pacific, the Arctic and the Indian Ocean, establishing access points to, e.g. the China–Indochina or the China–Pakistan economic corridors. While much more detailed with regard to the MSRI framework than previous documents, the ‘vision’ continues to sustain a spatial conceptualization that is intentionally broad and open, and at the same time, flexible and contingent.

The abstract framing of the MSRI, depicting it as a networked tool of Chinese globalization rather than a spatially fixed corridor connecting pre-defined nodes for developmental intervention and growth generation (Liu and Dunford, 2016), translates also into the maps circulated in the global media over the last few years (Sidaway and Woon, 2017). These cartographic expressions usually illustrate the MSRI in bold arrows transecting the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. However, the trajectories of these corridors significantly differ depending on the coastal places they connect, creating a ‘useful fuzziness’, that creates ‘a new, as of yet undefined, geopolitical identity [of the Belt & Road Initiative] in the future’ (Narins and Agnew, 2019: 2). This variation, or, as noted by Narins and Agnew (2019: 2), the complete absence of an official Chinese government BRI map, suggests certain flexibility in Chinese state efforts to contextualize large-scale and borderless infrastructural development around the globe (see also Summers, this set). Thus, it is the rule rather than an exemption that infrastructural projects long preceding the announcement of the ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiative, such as the Kyaukpyu transshipment zone in Myanmar or the Gwadar port in Pakistan, are nowadays reframed as key projects under the MSRI label. Others, like the port extension in Chittagong, Bangladesh, have literally fallen off the map after Bangladeshi officials became more reluctant of the role of Chinese state companies. Several new Chinese-funded port projects along the West African coast, such as the one in Tema, east of Ghana’s capital Accra, while being usually conceived to be located far off any geographical Silk Road logic (see the BRI map of the Mercator Institute for China Studies as displayed in Figure 1 in the introduction to this set), are at the same time locally put as extensions of the MSRI. Chinese distant water fisheries inside the exclusive economic zones along the West African Atlantic, being responsible for two-thirds of the global catch of China’s fleets, are however usually absent from the official MSRI discourse (Belhabib et al., 2015). This flexible approach endorses the inclusive, all-embracing and provisional approach of the BRI, with both of these aspects further contributing to intense speculations regarding the magnitude and depth of China’s developmental foray across its borders and into the oceanic realm.

The MSRI as assemblage

This section further engages with the condition of provisionality in the socio-spatial materialization of the MSRI in the Indian Ocean, which is due to both MSRI’s current position at a discursively symbolic or even utopian level of visionary documents and the ongoing multi-level negotiations around its implementation in particular places. An assemblage theory perspective offers a way to deal conceptually with the ongoing negotiations around the MSRI at the (trans-) local level. By so doing, it is suggested to overcome both conceptualizations of the MSRI as a tool for fixing Chinese development in a strictly corridorized way and as a networked policy device linking up coastal infrastructures along the Indian Ocean (and beyond) with China. It is argued instead for assemblage thinking being more appropriate to elaborate empirically the emergent, dynamically changing and indeterminate character (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011: 124) of the MSRI’s socio-spatial materialization in and between particular places (ports, transport corridors, shipping lanes, fishing zones) over time. Assemblage theory too could be particularly useful to conceptualize the provisional and unfixed configuration of relations between agentive elements (notably people, commodities, technical infrastructures, ships, fish and other marine organisms and discourses) shaping and being shaped by MSRI’s materialization.

Thinking in assemblages with regard to MSRI’s implementation draws attention to aspects of circulation of elements without centring exclusively on the state (Salter, 2013); to gathering, conjunctions and dispersions of, for example, development agents across different scales: local actors such as state officials, port workers or coastal communities, fishing or container vessels, ‘traveling’ representations of Chinese infrastructural engagement between interconnected places. Such a conceptual setup thus emphasizes both the spatiality and temporality of socio-spatial formations (McFarlane, 2009: 562). Assembling and (re-) assembling, as Anderson and McFarlane (2011) argue, can be framed as processes of becoming as ‘heterogeneous parts are gathered together and hold together. But this can ever be a provisional process: relations may change, new elements may enter, alliances may be broken, new conjunctions may be fostered’ (126). The ongoing (and open-ended) processes of assembling and re-assembling already affect and re-shape the symbolic and socio-spatial materiality of places currently labelled as being part of the MSRI. Thus, while, for example, the Chinese-funded port project in Hambantota, Southern Sri Lanka, has been discursively constructed (in the conventional Chinese official reading) as a hub of maritime connectivity that would produce win-win situations for actors at different scales, its significance as an engine for development from the livelihood to the transnational level has been increasingly challenged in Sri Lanka.

Hambantota district, 200 kilometres south of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, was long associated with socio-spatial remoteness due to the lack of connectedness. Fisheries and (subsistence) agriculture served as the main sectors of employment for the local population. It was only in 2008 that then president Mahinda Rajapaksa, hailing from a wealthy landowning family dominating the region’s politics and economy for decades, allied with China’s EXIM Bank as well as the state companies China Harbour Engineering and Sinohydro to lay the foundation for the first phase of port construction. Its completion two years later initially raised hopes of increasing prosperity and development among the district’s population, thus demonstrating some sort of alignment with the overall MSRI discourse. Being located only a few nautical miles away from one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, however, Hambantota’s failure was soon pinned down to the almost complete absence of ships using its services the first years after it became operative (Shepard, 2016). The port became known as a ‘white elephant’, and The New York Times (2018) even described it as a textbook example for China’s ‘debt trap’ politics. Due to mounting liabilities, the newly elected Sri Lankan government, despite a containment policy towards China’s role in Sri Lanka, had to negotiate a deal that effectively led to a 99-year lease arrangement of Hambantota port including 15,000 acres of farmland to China Merchants Port Holdings Co. in 2017 (Panda, 2017). In Hambantota District itself (as well as in Colombo), the deal with China sparked waves of enduring, partly violent, protests by the population facing increasing social marginalization, thus forging new alliances of actors in Hambantota’s governance. Local farmers led by the Buddhist clergy, besieging the regional parliament, heavily criticized the long-term lease agreement with China for Hambantota Port. Nation-wide protest over weeks, amplified by Sri Lanka’s notorious party politics, finally forced the government of Rajapaksa’s successor Maithripala Sirisena to increase the Sri Lankan port authority’s share in the Hambantota project from 10 to 30% and to demand amendments for the establishment of a special economic zone near the port (Sunday Observer, 2017).

The example of Hambantota, but also of other places being conventionally presented as (future) nodes along the MSRI, indicates that Chinese-funded and -engineered infrastructural development along and across the Indian Ocean is heavily disputed (trans-) locally and far from linear. Although the MSRI is generally represented as a long-term project, whose benefits are projected to pan out in decades to come rather than in years or months, it is likely that local negotiations will shape the immediate implementation and governance of infrastructural projects and therefore of the MSRI as a whole (Blanchard, 2017). An assemblage theory perspective towards the MSRI offers an approach to deal with these negotiations and their implications in time and space as it ‘connotes not a central governing power, nor a power distributed equally, but power as plurality in transformation’ (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011: 125). Assemblage theory therefore may be helpful to make the MSRI’s materialization on the ground more tangible by focusing on the evolution of multi-actor power negotiations and governance dynamics (Alff, 2019).

Conclusion

The MSRI as the maritime component of the BRI has been framed in the policy discourse as a fundamental device to forge Chinese-funded infrastructural development and thereby increase maritime connectivity and establish win-win situations between places and people in Asia, Africa, Europe and China. This paper has suggested to conceptualize the materialization of the MSRI in the Indian Ocean applying an assemblage theory perspective. Such an approach, it is argued, draws attention to the provisionality of the MSRI’s materialization on the ground. It challenges the seemingly orderly, state-centric character of the official MSRI outline as a blueprint for maritime and coastal development. An assemblage theory perspective rather connotes the emergent character of these processes as agentive elements--like local actors, state officials or coastal communities, Chinese fishing and container vessels, ‘traveling’ representations of Chinese infrastructural engagement between interconnected places--gather, conjunct and disperse. This emphasis on spatiality and temporality goes along with an evolutionary perspective on power negotiations between actors at different scales, challenging dominant Chinese top-down governance in the MSRI discourse.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Footnotes

Henryk Alff is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the junior research group ‘TRANSECT – Local Bioeconomy Scenarios in Central and South Asia’ at the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde, Germany. His previous research at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen focused on (trans-)local materializations of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative along the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

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