Infrastructure As Foreign Policy

Building a new world order From Beijing to Madrid Infrastructure and power Neo-colonialism?

- Jason Hilgefort

The Chinese economic expansion plan takes the form of a constellation of relationships going beyond the infrastructures actually built

As much of the world seeks to seal what they have via imaginary lines, China is leveraging borders to generate difference and facilitate economic exchange. Much has been made of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone; most miss the historical context of enclaves in the concessions, in Hong Kong itself, and in the emerging states of exception in the Pearl River Delta (currently rebranded by the Chinese government as the Greater Bay Area). Further, the narrative of China’s Belt Road Initiative mainly focuses on its infrastructure and omits the tied operations of state-owned developers.

China made a wall and it failed. For centuries China has been developing a cocktail of infrastructure, border thickening and urban development as a way to literally build urban economic ties.

Infrastructure culture

The works of the Chinese government with the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) are often explained to the world in terms of lines of infrastructural investments stretching across a map. In reality these gestures signify far more than train lines, ports, highways and pipelines. They are not merely some sort of passive “hardware” systems. Of course there are the advanced technologies of construction, port processing systems and much more inherent, but these universal languages of concrete and steel spell out a broader picture.

Emerging enclaves