Understanding Education on China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Cultural Political Economy Approach

Bowen Xu

doi:10.1163/25902539-03010005

Abstract

Abstract The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (bri) is a state-driven development campaign that promote economic integration and infrastructure building across Eurasia and beyond, aiming to reconnect countries and revive the prosperity of the historical Silk Road region. Since its inception in 2013, there has been a growing literature surrounding the initiative, yet the studies of education within the bri context remain relatively under-researched. This paper aims to explore such connection by undertaking the task through a combination of policy review, semi-structured interviews, and empirical fieldwork data. It adopts a Cultural Political Economy theoretical framework to analyzes how education policy and practice has been positioned, constructed, and coordinated in relation to the wider cultural political economy in assisting the bri planning and development. Against the background of China’s resurgence as a global power and its ambition in reinvigorating the Silk Road, I argue that the strategic positioning of education into the bri represents a constructive force in imagining, empowering, and materializing the New Silk Road Project. This reveals education and its multifaced properties in promoting cultural outreach, fulfilling political obligation, and accelerating economic growth in line with the overall bri building.

Highlights

Belt and Road Initiative – education – China – cultural political economy via free access understanding education on china’s belt and road initiative
In what ways might education policy and practice influence, or be influenced by, processes of cultural, political, and economic dynamics within and beyond China? Drawing on a combination of documentary analysis, semi-structured interviews, and existing theoretical framings, I argue that education is an integral part of the bri by showing how education has been designated as a crucial component in the bri imaginary to facilitate the bri materialization
This novel analytical framework has positioned education at the core of analysis through a three-dimensional interactive lens, offering a fuller account of reading of education through the concept of collegiality. These assumptions are built into critical realist’s perspectives in examining how distinct kinds of determinations work on, in and through an “education ensemble” (Robertson and Dale, 2015). By this it refers to the constellation of different elements – culture, politics and economy – which give rise to particular kinds of education moments or events. ccpee draws upon a critical realist’ social ontology, which intend to make sense of the ways in which structuring mechanisms and conditions in contexts lead to particular outcomes (Sayer, 2001; Robertson & Dale, 2015)

Summary

Introduction*

In the fall of 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed a global effort which has become widely known as the “One Belt One Road” (obor), later renamed the “Belt and Road Initiative” (bri). Since its birth in late 2013, the Belt and Road has begun to attract the attention of political scientists and economic analysts at a global scale What this initiative means for education has largely been neglected in the extant literature, with a few exceptions (Kirby & van de Wende, 2019; Peters et al, 2019). Given the increasing power of China and its international presence, the extent to which has education been implicated into China’s resurgence deserves urgent scrutiny To fulfill this gap, this paper draws from a larger, empirically driven project which aims to develop understanding about the role that education plays within the bri context, highlighting the complexity, multiplicity and multi-dimensional understandings of the bri. The subsequent section applies theoretical tools to an analysis, revealing how the broader dynamics of cultural political economy have given rise to various kinds of education initiatives that emerged out of the bri. It points out that these changing dynamics in wider social spheres at regional and global scales are fundamental to understanding education, affecting the emerging shape and form of it, and co-constituting the bri development

Theoretical Positioning and Methodological Choice

Education on the Belt and Road

Concluding Remarks