BOOK REVIEW: The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order
“The book provides a useful provocation for those interested in U.S.-China competition to focus more on the city as a key domain of contestation”
A new book by Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus Belt and Road City provides a welcome new angle into the BRI story by focusing on the implications of the BRI for cities. As someone who has been trying to bring urban studies/ planning and international relations together in my work (two fields that rarely if ever engage with one other), I couldn’t be more sympathetic to their main proposition: throughout history, great powers are not merely those that set the rules of international institutions or build roads and bridges, but also the ones that build cities. Despite this, the book could have provided a lot more on the ground detail (and more visuals) to give us a better picture and feel of what the “Belt and Road City” actually entails. At the core of the book is the question of how construction of cities does (or doesn’t) embed certain relations in place, and certain collective aspirations and visions of what modernity should be, or what cities should be—what STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff might call “sociotechnical imaginaries.”1 Most accounts of BRI have focused on China’s efforts to build connective infrastructure (ports, roads, rail, pipelines). But cities are in many ways more tangible and shape how millions of people will live, perhaps for centuries to come. Does China’s form of state capitalism and/or a focus on emerging technologies (5G, smart cities, surveillance) constitute an alternative “urban model”, or do China’s investments merely layer onto already complex urban assemblages? This is a question Belt and Road City begins to answer.
The book provides a useful provocation for those interested in U.S.-China competition to focus more on the city as a key domain of contestation—China has understood, probably correctly, that by providing future infrastructure to shape the development of the world’s future cities across Asia and Africa, it will be shaping values, norms, and ideas about what constitutes “good cities” and desirable development in much of the world. In Chapter 2 “Infrastructure” authors demonstrate an awareness of a wide swath of classic work in urban theory, infrastructure studies, and history from Keller Easterling to Langdon Winner, to Foucault and Henri Lefebvre--the “darlings” of Leftist urban theory. All of these authors have engaged the relations between power (either in a domestic sense, or global sense) and urban and architectural space. But these thinkers have rarely been engaged or taken seriously by scholars of political science and international relations —Curtis and Klaus offer a welcome counter to this. The authors rightly note that city building programs have been key aspects of shaping great power projection and political ideology—from British Empire’s construction of cities and urban infrastructure throughout their empire, to postwar American reconstruction of cities in Europe and Asia, to the Soviet Union and China’s own internal efforts to build Socialist societies through transformation of urban form and housing—the Soviet Microrayon or the Chinese danwei.
Proposition: The Belt and Road City
The book begins with an overview, in which the authors argue for an emergent new form of city tied to China’s Belt and Road projects in Asia and Africa. The first two chapters mostly cover the origins and genesis of the BRI as a Chinese vision for a new world order, and a massive infrastructure program to developing countries—most of this is material that has already been well covered elsewhere. However, what the authors do add is drawing attention to the urban implications of the BRI. As they note, “when we write of the Belt and Road City, then, we write not of a roster of specific cities, but of a movement toward a historically new form of city, and of a new connection forming between urban form and process and the rise of new Great Power, China, with its historically specific features, and its ambition to reshape political order.” (11.). They outline core features of the BRI city (12-13), which include:
focus on logistics and trade, tied into emerging urban corridors
generation of new urban “gateways” that link these corridors
sense of the city’s connectivity to infrastructure, logistics, movement, with the Belt and Road City always existing, spatially as part of new regional concepts and corridors
the layering of new forms and structures onto existing ones
urban spaces shaped via explicit bilateral joint agreements, with provisions for forming governance structures that give companies or corporations a role in government policies and responsibilities
Another general point the authors make is that across various periods in history, the shape and form of cities has been critical to the projection of global power by nation states and/or empires. They cite previous examples like postwar British and French New towns, U.S. interest in modernism and development as a bulkwark against Communism in the developing world, Soviet town planning as a tool for building Communism, and Chinese town planning (danwei). The authors argue “cities and urban areas are grasped at and competed over as platforms for the exercise of power and influence. And this may be more true now, in the context of the BRI, than at any time since the beginning of World War II.” (97) One of the authors, Ian Klaus, a former advisor for Global Cities in the U.S. State Department, is uniquely placed to write this book, having had a vantage point into the connections between U.S. foreign policy and global urban policy.
The authors also interestingly distinguish the BRI city from the “global city” (epitomized by global financial centers like New York, London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong). The BRI city allegedly focuses much more on infrastructure, logistics, and production and not necessarily in attracting white collar talent whereas the “global city”, at least in the way it was conceptualized by Saskia Sassen, is a “site for the production of specialized services needed by complex organizations for running a spatially dispersed network of factories, offices, service outlets,”—”command and control nodes of the global financial system.”2 The global city system, the authors note, was directly a product of an era of U.S. -led globalization beginning in the 1970s. The rise of BRI as an alternative urban (as well as geopolitical) system, could preface a weakening of influence of so-called global cities, an interesting speculation that I don’t believe has been made elsewhere. Already, London and Hong Kong have been diminished in recent years—although not so much by the rise of BRI but by failed domestic policies in those places.
Critiques
What the authors accomplish at a general level of theoretical provocation is not matched by a level of detail or research on the ground one would expect from a book claiming to analyze the future of actually existing urban spaces. The authors do admit the Belt and Road City is more of a “heuristic device that can help us to understand the entry into the world of both a distinctive new form of urban life, and a distinctive vision of geopolitical order, both of which are in the process of becoming” (11) rather than a fixed form. But they also claim, sometimes paradoxcally at various points that there are in fact some distinct features of the BRI city: “Given China’s remarkable urban rise, and leadership in innovation and experimentation, it is tempting to look for a universally implemented Chinese model for the cities along the BRI that are being built or redeveloped. Indeed we can see important patterns there that align with Chinese goals, including approaches to special economic zones, mass housing, industrialization, and digital surveillance.” (97) Curtis and Klaus are mindful to avoid over claiming some sort of ‘ideal type” BRI city, and they do acknowledge BRI projects are layered into places with existing history and cultures, and that BRI projects may evolve in unforeseen ways given the agency of actors in the countries themselves, and potentially even reshape China’s own urban spaces in the process—this is a fascinating proposition but unfortunately is not deeply engaged in the rest of the book. The case of Xi’an becoming a logistics hub is one piece of evidence there, but how else might China be transformed in its relationship with the rest of the world?
Chapter 3 “Urban Spaces” makes a whirlwind tour through some of the supposed paradigmatic BRI cities, from Cape Coast in Ghana to Gwadar City Pakistan to Vientiane, Laos; Sihanoukville, Cambodia; Addis Abbaba, Ethiopia. The authors also talk about Xi’an’s infrastructure and logistics park where China-Europe trains depart and arrive as evidence of the remaking of urban space within China. But all of these examples are fairly cursory, and each city gets only a page or two within one chapter, culled from secondary sources—which the authors nonetheless do show considerable engagement with. I was left wanting more—both in terms of visual material (maps, photos, sketches) of the urban spaces and in terms of actual human detail. For a book on cities and architecture, there are almost no images and maybe one conceptual map of BRI not unlike those reproduced in myriad newspapers and think tank reports. Maybe this is just my bias coming from the design world, where coffee-table books can sometimes err in the other extreme of all beautiful diagrams and images.
The rest of the book, chapters 4 “Tools of Influence” and Chapter 5 “International Order” zooms out again to focus on broader dynamics. Chapter 4 usefully looks at some of China’s efforts to shape new international institutions (AIIB, for example), and the funds used to invest in BRI projects like the Silk Road Fund. However there is almost nothing on the giant SOEs actually building these projects: China Merchants, China Communications Group, Sinohydro (PowerChina), just to name a few. Chapter 5 is a sort of strange meditation on Chinese concepts of tianxia or “all under heaven” in which the authors speculate as to how this new international order might have a different geographic and relational logic compared to the Western-led “Westphalian order” that has largely structured international relations since the Renaissance. However, this chapter mostly repeats cliched tropes about a Chinese-led global order that have been made by plenty of other Western writers before them—Martin Jacques and Bruno Macaes, among them.3 For this reason, the book starts in the first chapter on a very interesting and novel perspective to bring together studies of cities and international relations, but then ends on rather cliched and general way that leaves one wondering what exactly the authors were trying to do with this book.
Even as I am sympathetic to the authors’ overarching point, the lack of detail left me unconvinced that there is in fact a distinct urban form that the title “Belt and Road City” suggests. And while the authors do admit that this book is meant as an opening in a conversation rather than a definitive account, I think the book could have made more of an impact if they had spent more time observing in detail at least a few of the cities they mention in Chapter 3, rather than in rehashing material on the BRI’s genesis and connections to China’s grand strategy in the first two chapters, which have been written about extensively in existing accounts of BRI. There are also a number of other cities that could have been examined or at least mentioned—Sri Lanka’s Colombo Port and Finance City, for example stands out as one glaring omission.
What about cities that are only receiving marginal Chinese infrastructure aid and thus may not conform to an ideal BRI City type—Hanoi’s new metro line was built by China but this has hardly transformed the city into a replica of Chinese urbanism. In fact, Korean investment is much more visible in urban Vietnam. Thailand is building an elevated high speed rail from Bangkok to Nong Khai, but Thailand maintained financing and ownership of the line, also not conforming to the narrative of BRI as a conduit of total Chinese influence on the cities that receive infrastructure aid. State ownership of urban land, a defining feature of China’s urban development model, is almost impossible to replicate in the more diverse urban conditions of Vietnam (Vietnam has similar state ownership of land but it is not as strongly exercised as in Chinese cities) and Thailand, not to mention in African cities. Consequently, the urban landscape in these places looks radically different than actual Chinese cities.
Conclusions
Despite these omissions, the book provides a helpful starting point for reconnecting urban studies and international relations, and bringing discussions of BRI from the abstract world of think tanks and grand strategy to the material implications on the ground for those directly affected by BRI projects. And if you don’t know anything about BRI, this book will be a helpful introduction. However, I also take the book as a call for more grounded and detailed research. The brief synopses of BRI cities in Chapter 3 cannot possibly provide a rich and meaningful account of the transformation of those urban spaces that the authors are interested in. Nevertheless, the authors do cite and engage with a number of scholars who have actually done on-the-ground work, something to be commended.
Mentioning these missing details is not merely a pedantic academic critique. They matter for assessing the core claims of the book—that in fact there is something distinctive about the new urban forms emerging from Chinese infrastructure aid programs, and that these cities will in fact (through their physical forms, economic systems, technologies—what Easterling would call ‘dispositifs’)4 reinforce and cement Chinese power through their shaping of the way millions of future urban residents will live and work. In the work I have done on smart cities Thailand and Southeast Asia, I began with a similar hypothesis as the one advanced by Curtis and Klaus—that Chinese companies (Huawei, China Rail, etc) were in fact reshaping what citizens and leaders in these countries expected from modern cities. But at the time of my own research, I found my initial hypothesis to be somewhat immature. Thailand is a bell-weather for assessing the impact of BRI outside the poorer countries (Laos, Sri Lanka, Pakistan) that have received significant BRI aid. Thailand is a high middle-income economy and has significant economic relations with Japan and the West. Ideas about future urbanism are not only coming from China. Thailand’s own ministries and digital transformation office maintains extensive connections with Korean and Japanese firms, American firms, and also Chinese companies. Just to take the case of CCTV surveillance technology—even as Chinese companies like Hikvision have been selling a lot of cameras and systems in places like Thailand, the administrative structure is entirely different and less centralized than in China. While police departments are deploying such systems, the provision of Chinese-supplied surveillance hardware has not led to the kind of “surveillance state” we see in China. The difference is in the institutions—something not adequately addressed in Belt and Road City. Transferring hardware does not automatically lead to new visions of the ideal city.
As a professor on China-Thai relations at Chulalongkorn University told me
‘The discourse in terms of development is very different from China: in Thailand its more quality of life and sustainability. We are still more influenced by Western discourse and quality of life stuff rather than the focus on infrastructure—we have very few people educated in China, so I think that the discourse in terms of industrial policy is there but its not a consensus, and its not something deep in the public mind.”
This one comment is not by itself definitive evidence that China and Chinese companies are not playing a role in reshaping understanding of ideal cities in the developing world. Perhaps it is simply too early to tell the full extent of China’s influence on Thailand (and other countries’) development. But it does point to a picture of multiplicity and pluralism rather than China as a singularly critical agent of influence in defining future urban form.
Having been written by someone once in the State Department, I was also surprised the book did not offer more concrete suggestions for refashioning U.S. policy to engage with the urban development challenge of BRI and the need to provide better options of infrastructure and development throughout the global south. Of course, the Biden administration and its allies have unveiled programs like Blue Dot and Build Back Better to try to do this, but so far they have failed to make meaningful strides in the areas where China has already been engaging for decades. From my work in Thailand, U.S. companies are still well respected as icons of technological innovation. Even in Bangkok, Cisco has a dominant presence in IT infrastructure (Huawei is trying to chip away at this), and Silicon Valley remains a symbol of urban innovation for many city leaders in the region. But the U.S., government has not leveraged this private sector capacity for U.S. influence abroad except as part of small programs, such as the US-ASEAN Smart Cities Partnership (USASCP) Transportation Program or the Mekong-U.S. Partnership (MUSP) Regional Connectivity Program. These are welcome programs, but pale in scale to BRI and its financing.
At the very least, Belt and Road City is a welcome call for urbanists and geographers to engage with international relations, and vice versa. It’s an opening it what I hope will be much stronger engagement between urbanists and scholars of geopolitics/international relations. Too often, siloed disciplines rarely talk to one another.
Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. 1st edition. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Revised edition edition. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Maçães, Bruno. Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order. London: Hurst, 2020.
Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. Fifth Edition. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Reprint edition. London New York: Verso, 2016.
Really enjoyed this review - any books that you'd recommend I read before picking this one up?