A Belt and Road Decade? Charting the Diachronic and Exegetic Boundaries of China's Connectivity Discourse

Abstract

Since its announcement in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative has generated a prolific commentary in global news media and academia. Beyond merely chronicling China’s economic diplomacy in the developing world, a mixture of speculative analysis and ‘connectivity’ hyperbole has attempted to compensate for the lack of official guidance from Beijing. Hypotheses attempting to explain the proposed-scale and timing of the initiative have ranged from pragmatic evaluations of the domestic economic pressures facing the party leadership, to assumptions of geopolitical hegemony and the implied influence of the People’s Liberation Army. Chinese institutions have been key drivers of this media phenomenon but individual sub-narratives have also enjoyed their own impetus. Some of these build on pre-existing discursive trends that were globally-recognizable by the mid-2000s, some rely more on events unique to the Belt and Road Initiative and the international geopolitical context of the long decade that followed the Global Financial Crisis. This paper traces the evolution of this ‘Belt and Road Decade’ in media and academia, and presents the case for both its singularity, reliance on a broader zeitgeist and arguably, its expired utility for Beijing in the 2020s. The paper concludes by reconciling the optimism and scepticism of BRI punditry with the empirical markers for China’s development and foreign relations in the present day