Ever since China announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, many academic research, policy reports, and journalistic commentaries have been very sceptical about the intentions and outcomes of such a massive infrastructure plan. There exist contending interpretations of this particular Chinese grand strategy to extend its relationship to the Global South writ large—some altogether sceptical and branding the project as a reflection of extractive neo-colonialism, military expansionism and authoritarian statism; others increasingly read an emergent politics of hope and of claiming new developmental spaces by engaging/recipient countries in relation to President Xi’s ambitious Chinese dream and the abundance of Chinese capital. In this context, the panel seeks to examine the changing China-BRI state relations as ‘global China’ deepens its engagement with the Global South. We seek to (a) map cross-country and cross-sectoral engagements between China and recipient countries in the BRI infrastructural projects; (b) map and explain the power dynamics between China and host states, and how high politics are mediated by sub-national actors in the design and implementation of BRI within developing country contexts; (c) outline the role of industrial policy as a development strategy, the various factors explaining implementation of such policies, and their immediate outcomes; and (d) evaluate the extent to which industrial strategies developed through the BRI have succeeded in promoting long-term structural transformation of national economies.

Paper 1

Nothing ventured, nothing gained: New forms of dependent development in the age of Chinese state capitalism?

Linda Yin-nor Tjia, City University of Hong Kong & Jewellord Nem Singh, International Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands

Despite China’s claim that South-South cooperation is a win-win development model, critical scholarship often characterizes such initiative as an imperial effort to scramble for natural resources, resolve excessive productive capacities, exert neo-colonial exploitation, and expand military influences. Moving beyond the debate of China’s intention and intended outcomes, this article offers a new theoretical perspective to investigate how engaging/recipient countries have leveraged Chinese dreams and capital. Our paper starts with a key assumption, which posits the Chinese grand strategy as ‘highly contingent, extremely loose, and indeterminate by nature,” and thus can be shaped and manipulated by both the competing interests within the Chinese state and the divergent domestic dynamics of power in host states. Juxtaposing the state-level asymmetric power structures with sub-national industrial policies, we explore under what conditions China’s involvement in the selected developing countries embedded within the BRI project are able to craft alternative development strategies. Overall, we develop a typology categorizing various possible ventures to tilt the balance of power and gain from diversifying the economic engagements from pure resource and connectivity related sectors.

Paper 2

China in Kazakhstan: Connectivity, conflicts and coping capacity

Linda Yinnor Tjia, City University of Hong Kong

This paper argues that China’s determination to connect to the West has given the Kazakh government more leverage in demanding support for non-connectivity projects. China’s presence has also fostered a mixed Sinophobic resistance and Sinophilic drive to shape the nuanced evolvement of the newly incorporated Sino-Kazakh joint projects. Tracing Kazakhstan’s effort to diversify its economy from the resource industry in the past 30 years, this paper illuminates that China’s introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 has unintentionally tipped the asymmetric Sino-Kazakh power structure and given Kazakhstan more leverage to negotiate for a desirable way to collaborate with China in the car assembly industry. The materialization of such industrial policy varies in terms of the planner’s vision and capacity, the contested sub-national interests, as well as the co-evolvement of these two emerging forces. The empirical case study of the booming car assembly industry in Kazakhstan contributes to a comprehensive and nuanced explanation of the intended and un-intended outcome for a typical Global South government to engage with China’s state capital.

Paper 3

How China is Reshaping Southeast Asia: Railways, Economic Development, and South-South Cooperation

Guanie Lim, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

This paper deciphers the manners that Chinese capital exports – in the form of railway projects – have contributed to the reconfiguration of development practices in the Global South. More broadly, it unpacks the latest trends for South-South Cooperation (SSC), of which China is increasingly viewed as the Global South’s leading donor and agenda setter. It focuses on two of the most prominent Chinese railway projects in the region since the 2013 inception of the Belt and Road Initiative – Malaysia’s East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) and Indonesia’s Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Rail (HSR). The paper makes three inter-related arguments. Firstly, the Chinese have pushed both projects with a noticeable degree of pragmatism and outcome-orientation, moving away from the economic diplomacy and political solidary of traditional forms of SSC. Secondly, China is showing some policy convergence with traditional Global North economies in the development of the Malaysian and Indonesian railway projects. This suggests that China’s rise does not necessarily lead to more policy autonomy for its Global South brethren. Thirdly, despite perceived assertiveness from the Chinese, some room still exists for recipient states to manoeuvre, although the bargaining space appears to be higher for Indonesia rather than Malaysia. In addition to extensive secondary data research, the paper is informed by fieldwork and personal interviews, conducted from May 2016 to December 2018, with individuals, primarily policymakers, business executives, and academic and think tank researchers, involved in these projects and in broader economic engagement with the Chinese government and its national firms.

Paper 4

The Belt and Road Initiative and the Coal-Cement Interface in South and Southeast Asia

Alvin Camba, Johns Hopkins University

In the Global South, the population’s demand in economic involvement lead to increased need for greater energy capacity. China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) has financed a variety of energy infrastructures, particularly coal-fired power plants, which are rapidly increasing in most BRI-recipient countries. However, cement factories owned by host country business elites have also been expanding at alarming rates alongside the coal-fired powerplants. I ask: why are cement factories increasing alongside China’s BRI-financed coal-fired plants?

By examining Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, four countries that have the highest number of new coal-fired power plants and cement factories in the world, I argue that the coal-cement interface is a function of a political settlement between Chinese firms and domestic business elites. The affinity between host country leaders needing to increase their supply of energy and Chinese coal companies needing to relocate has created a surge in the construction of coal-fired power plants. Taking advantage of this expansion, host country business elites, who are often campaign contributors or family members of host country leaders, are building cement factories to provide cement inputs to ongoing foreign-funded infrastructure projects in their countries. Coal-fired powerplants provide the quick and cheap energy access to the cement industry, a sector with low-cost barriers of entry, buying the participation of host country business elites. I built the paper by combining a newly constructed dataset on Chinese financing and shareholder data on cement factories alongside several detailed case studies derived from field research.