Guest Editorial: The social life of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Introduction

As part of the broader China Made project, the papers in this special section aim to provide grounded, fine-grained analyses of the environmental, social, cultural, political, and economic effects of China's infrastructure development initiatives in Southeast Asia.¹ They were originally presented at the Third China Made Workshop in May of 2021, held online at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore (see Byler & Oakes, 2021 for a summary). The papers in this special section explore the social lives of Chinese infrastructures with case studies from Vietnam (Turner et al., 2023), Cambodia (Green & Yi, 2023) and Laos (Harlan & Lu, 2024). In doing so, they investigate the ways that global China is a powerful shaper of landscapes and societies in Southeast Asia, as well as the multiple contingencies and agencies that condition, limit, and push back against China's infrastructural power.

As we write now in 2024, China's development activities and investments beyond its borders have garnered a tremendous amount of attention from scholars, policymakers, politicians, and the general public alike. Much of that attention has focused on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the primary policy vehicle for these activities and investments (see Lin et al., 2019 and Lin et al., 2021 for critical and theoretical engagements with BRI-related scholarship). The China Made project emerged in this context with the goal of exploring China's infrastructure-led development practices less from a policy perspective, or even from the view of geopolitics, and more from a fine-grained and grounded analysis of the projects themselves. We thus sought to bring a contextual and place-based perspective to our understanding of China as an emerging actor on the global development scene. We felt that such an approach depended upon an historical understanding of the role that infrastructure development has played in Chinese statecraft and in China's domestic political economy over the past several decades (Rippa & Oakes, 2023). Conceptually, we hoped such an approach would open up a space for a productive transdisciplinary conversation between the China studies and infrastructure studies fields (see e.g. Oakes, 2019; Oakes, 2021). This conversation has emphasized not simply the ways the Chinese state deploys infrastructure development as a form of power and state-making, but also the ways infrastructures themselves, as socio-technical assemblages, have agentive powers and material logics that shape environmental, social, cultural, and political life in significant ways, both within and beyond China's borders.

The 2021 workshop at ARI focused on these environmental, social, cultural, and political dimensions of Chinese infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia, a region often regarded as the first segment and most important part of China's Belt and Road (Gong, 2019; Emmerson, 2020; Hiebert, 2020). Collectively, Southeast Asia is China's largest trading partner, and vice versa. But the BRI has dominated much of the analysis of China's diverse activities in Southeast Asia. In response, there has been a recognized need for ways of understanding ‘how China's impacts on Southeast Asia can be better understood beyond only focusing on China-centred framings such as the BRI’ (Lin & Yang, 2022: 228; see also Rowedder et al., 2023). We proceeded from the premise that Chinese infrastructure development in the region is shaped by more than China's longstanding geopolitical ambitions, desires for market expansion, and the need for a spatial fix for Chinese surplus capital. We focused particular attention on the ways that infrastructures, with their material dispositions, are capable of producing their own developmental logics, propulsions, and powers over life.

While the workshop explored these issues through a broad variety of cases and analytics, the papers collected here explore the social lives of Chinese infrastructure in three broad themes: global China as a field of power; the technopolitics of infrastructure; and the spatial and temporal dimensions of infrastructure development. In this brief editorial, we explore each of these themes in general terms and comment on how they are reflected and engaged in the papers collected here. We will also provide some concluding thoughts on the role of infrastructure studies in the rapidly growing field of global China studies.