Description
In 2017, ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative (BRI) was presented by the Chinese government as a global initiative for governance. This narrative, or from a post-structuralist perspective, this truth about BRI, is widely accepted both domestically and globally. However, the assumptions that underpin this particular truth and the conditions that produce it are rarely questioned. This paper investigates, therefore, these assumptions and conditions through applying the concept of assemblage. By doing so, it identifies suppressed elements within the BRI narrative that are salient to our understanding but have not been engaged with in current research. This paper argues that the truth about BRI is contingent and (re)produced through a continuous assembling process in which heterogenous elements, both human and non-human, interact with one another. In other words, by breaking down what the Chinese government has claimed about BRI into its component parts, this paper has found no inherent essence, in this case, being global, open, and cooperative, to this initiative beyond official written documents themselves. Instead, BRI has emerged as a solution to the ‘problems’ pertaining to China’s national identity and economic performance, and gradually become a regional, and then, global initiative enabled by China’s institutional design, its national identity conception, foreign policy discourses, infrastructure technology, and its landscape.
