Port power 02: Chinese geoeconomic hopes and American geopolitical fears

Abstract

The port power concept analyzes achieving a hegemonic position over ports as a sign of geopolitical transition towards a new order. It has focused on the material structures of power transfer through the construction, development, hegemony, and ownership of ports, and the discursive analysis is limited to examining port-based geopolitical codes. Here, we develop the idea of port power by adding a discursive layer of the emotional and narrative spaces that govern ports through an empirical study of the “framing of China's hopes” to become a hegemon with peaceful images, contrasting with “US fears” in producing images of threat from China's malign rise. In the geopolitical analysis of the spatial relations of political and economic power, we examine the interaction of simultaneous material and discursive processes in the construction of ports and connections. This approach can provide a geopolitical understanding of geographical imagination and mental mappings in producing real and imaginary spaces. This article examines China's presence in global shipping geographies from three perspectives. First, it analyzes the production of China's geopolitical and geoeconomic imaginations of ports to generate a sense of hope from investment projects to attract more foreign port states. Then it examines the spatial arrangement of China's port discourse for material articulation in maritime shipping geographies and global strategic nodes. Finally, it analyzes the US and others' geopolitical fears of China's port power.