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Hong Shen (2018)
Building a Digital Silk Road? Situating the Internet in China's Belt and Road InitiativeInternational Journal of Communication, 12
Weidong Liu (2021)
Confucian geopolitics or Chinese geopolitics?Dialogues in Human Geography, 11
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S. Couture, S. Toupin (2019)
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Voluminous states
(2020)
Xinguanyiqinghou dongbeiquyu jingjizhenxingyugoujian jiyuyusilu [The opportunities for economic recovery in the northeastern region in the post‐pandemic period]
This paper reflects on how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can contribute to more cosmopolitan forms of theory‐making and the diversification of knowledges. It focuses on emerging Chinese narratives of the Digital Silk Road (DSR) that cast the initiative as emblematic of an improved BRI 2.0 in the (post‐)pandemic era. With subterranean fibre‐optic cables and satellite systems constituting important components of the DSR, I argue that these Chinese discourses fundamentally expose the ‘horizontal’ bias in infrastructure debates, thereby forcing an analytical re‐orientation towards the notion's volumetric possibilities. Reconceptualising infrastructures in volumetric terms opens up opportunities for interrogating issues of representational politics, power and sovereignty that matter for the DSR and beyond. Using Chinese perspectives of the DSR for the purpose of theory‐building, however, does not equate to endorsing Sinocentrism or privileging the BRI as a totalising framework for interpreting the world. Rather, it signifies an effort to ‘provincialise’ the BRI – ensuring that different voices and subjectivities can co‐exist in the ongoing and unfinished project of rethinking/reconstructing the BRI.
Asia Pacific Viewpoint – Wiley
Published: Dec 1, 2021
Keywords: Chinese narratives; Digital Silk Road; digital sovereignty; provincialising; volumetric infrastructures
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