The Belt Road Initiative: Infrastructural Futures and a Chinese Anthropocene?

Abstract

The Belt Road Initiative (BRI), aka the New Silk Roads, is often feted as the largest infrastructural programme not just in the world today, but ever. First announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, it has slowly garnered increasing commentary and scrutiny, but focusing overwhelmingly on high-level geo-political issues, largely defined by existing ‘common-senses’. Meanwhile, in STS and critical geographies, an ‘infrastructural turn’ (Graham 2010) has continued apace, illuminating the question of infrastructure – its in/visibility & blackboxing, disruption, maintenance, complexity, networked interconnection – as a key issue for contemporary politics; and, indeed, for the contemporary redefinition of ‘politics’ itself regarding onto-politics, materiality, virtuality, embodiment and liveliness. Booming discussions (largely Western) of the Anthropocene and technosphere, in which issues of infrastructure are so central if often overlooked, are also of central relevance here, not least in terms of how these will be shaped by the increasing, but unfamiliar and uncertain, global influence of China. In this context, the emergence of an infrastructure programme that is not just unprecedented in scale, but also a vehicle for the geopolitical ascendancy of a putative global hegemon that is, for the first time, not trans-Atlantic presents arguably the key arena to test and develop further the conceptual and theoretical innovations of the infrastructural turn. Yet the BRI remains largely ignored from this perspective. This panel thus invites papers that will explore how the BRI and STS can illuminate and develop each other, and the key question of infrastructural global futures amidst the Anthropocene and/or China’s ‘Ecological Civilization’.

Chair

• Jamie Allen, Critical Media Lab

Individual Presentations

• WeChat as an Infrastructure in Contemporary China - Rui Zhou, Georgia Institute of Technology; Betsy DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Post-Metabolic Infrastructures: Belt and Road as Rift - Jamie Allen, Critical Media Lab; Martin Müller, Humboldt University of Berlin; Karolina Sobecka, fhnw

• Units and Unity in Chinese Eco-Civilisation: Infrastructure Led Conservation of the BRI - Louise Emily Carver, University of Lancaster

Session Organizer

• David Tyfield, Lancaster University