The Bamiyazation of Cultural Heritage and the Silk Road Economic Belt: Challenges and Opportunities for China

Abstract

In 2013, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, announced an ambitious new agenda for Chinese foreign policy: the Silk Road Economic Belt. Heralded as a gift from China to the world, his envisioned program aims to resurrect the historical Silk Road, which linked East and West by land and sea. The historical Silk Road was built to facilitate trade, but it grew to have a distinct wider political and cultural impact. In this article, we argue that this political and cultural impact is currently being threatened by what we call the ‘Bamiyazation phenomenon’ — an iconoclastic movement with transnational dimensions that particularly affects routes along the Silk Road. We contend that China should adopt a more holistic approach to the development of the twenty-first century Silk Road. To this end, we suggest that China should spearhead the defence and protection of the world’s cultural heritage through implementing and promoting a specified ‘crime against common cultural heritage’ in order to counteract the effects of the Bamiyazation phenomenon and to support the development of China’s new international identity as a power that, in Xi Jinping’s own words, ‘adopt[s] a right approach with some important principles.’