Abstract
AbstractThis article studies what I describe as “state-coordinated investment partnerships,” an investment modality central to the deployment of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These partnerships bring together state and business actors to export overcapacity and address infrastructural demands in underdeveloped markets. To do so, they require accumulation and sovereignty regimes that mirror, in contingent ways, similar social arrangements within China. The superposition of such regimes and the interests and social imaginaries of local actors produces forms of uneven and combined development and shapes the contours of the BRI's emerging developmental and geoeconomic footprints. The BRI exports also an elite development paradigm which promotes urbanization, connectivity and economic growth over participatory approaches. This paradigm projects a depoliticized version of China's present into the BRI's future to justify social and environmental dislocations, and shields Chinese firms from civil society scrutiny. My analysis rejects this elite perspective and favors a labor-centric approach that unearths the social foundations of the BRI. From this perspective, despite relevant differences in format, the BRI's quintessential investment modality is closely aligned to a contemporary global current of public-private partnerships endeavored to mobilize public resources and state power for the expansion of capitalist social relations.
Highlights
In times of austerity and microfinance, it may seem difficult to believe that a few decades ago, development used to be “great.” “Great,” does not mean “better.” There are few reasons to long for a past of nationalist schemes that embraced growth and industrialization above the rights of many, reproducing severe gender and racial inequalities
Development was “great,” in the sense that political elites around the world were often committed to deliver “legible” forms of national modernization based on large infrastructural works and industrial transformation
The period expanding from the Great Depression of the 1930s and through what sometimes has been described as the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” running from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, was emblematic of such commitment.[2]
Summary
In times of austerity and microfinance, it may seem difficult to believe that a few decades ago, development used to be “great.” “Great,” does not mean “better.” There are few reasons to long for a past of nationalist schemes that embraced growth and industrialization above the rights of many, reproducing severe gender and racial inequalities. The period expanding from the Great Depression of the 1930s and through what sometimes has been described as the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” running from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, was emblematic of such commitment.[2] This age of national development saw the New Deal revitalize the American economy with major public works and social programs to upend economic inequalities and, to save capitalism. The Marshall Plan sought to strategically rebuild and modernize Europe on a large scale, while diffusing liberal and pro-market norms.[3] On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the USSR provided unprecedented assistance for industrial and military development to countries like China, which went from having two hundred trained geologists in 1949 to aiming to overcome U.S steel production by the end of the 1950s, albeit with disastrous consequences.[4] Years later, Japan would commit its aid efforts in the Asian region to infrastructure
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