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.
Industry Reviews
"Seeing China's Belt and Road is a highly original take on China's elusive global infrastructure project. Through the visions of BRI participants, from Chinese workers in Ethiopia to recipients of Chinese technology in Central Asia, this book illuminates the dynamism and unevenness of this grand initiative, as it continues to shape the world, often in invisible ways." -- Maria Repnikova, Associate Professor in Global Communication, Georgia State
University
"Moving beyond seeing BRI as 'infrastructure' and 'development,' this volume provides fresh perspectives on how BRI generates its own underside, showing us how subject positions and social meanings proliferate in rhizomatic fashion the further downstream we go from the locus of power." -- Brenda Yeoh, National University of Singapore
"A timely and highly recommended collection--while many studies of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative emphasize Beijing's geopolitical and global ambitions, these essays are steeped in bottom-up observations and textured local analysis. They reveal critically important variations in how the publics of BRI host countries experience Chinese digital technologies, view overseas Chinese workers, and understand how China's infrastructure projects are transforming
their own local communities." -- Alexander Cooley, Barnard College, Columbia University