Global China goes green : environmental politics of the belt and road initiative

Abstract

A “Global China” is emerging as the country’s overseas engagement expands, notably through infrastructure development under the aegis of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Concerns and criticisms regarding the BRI’s environmental impacts pushed the Chinese government to formalize the “Green Belt and Road” (Green BRI). The initiative’s contestation by various actors transnationally has not been thoroughly examined. From this point of departure, the dissertation explores the motivations and mobilizations of diverse BRI participants in addressing how the Green BRI is implemented, negotiated, and instantiated. Methodologically, the dissertation relies on the analysis of archival documents and interviews and observations collected from fieldwork and online channels, assisted by geospatial data. Theoretically, situated within academic debates on rising powers, Global China, and environmental governance, this dissertation develops a three-pronged approach centered on “actor-relation-spatiality” to unpack the “domestic-extraterritorial” spatiality of actors and their power relations. The dissertation argues that the Green BRI is not merely a top-down state undertaking, but rather a political arena contested by numerous political, corporate, and civic actors. Their interests in this infrastructural scheme come into conflict with one another both domestically and extraterritorially. These dynamics are reflected in implicit (geo)politics in the knowledge production of the Green BRI, the relational power politics of Chinese state and non-state actors in pursuing their interests and influences in the initiative, and scalar politics in the local governance of BRI projects’ environmental impacts. These are elaborated in chapters 4-7, with each chapter investigating the roles and actions of different actors involved in the Green BRI, namely scholars, governmental authorities, non-state actors, and local actors. Chapter 4 interrogates Chinese and foreign scholarship on environmental issues relating to the BRI. Identifying disparate perceptions regarding the initiative’s “greenness,” it is argued that geopolitics are implicitly embedded within allegedly objective scholarship. Chapter 5 probes the Chinese state’s exercise of power and subject formation in environmental governance in extraterritorial spaces. Chapter 5 finds that the Green BRI represents a dialectic between China’s uptake of international norms and its quest for exporting homegrown norms, to which subjectivities vary based on actors’ own interests, state interests, and BRI contexts. Chapter 6 examines non-state mobilizations and finds that the way Chinese NGOs “go out” across domestic-international spaces is shaped by their organizational objectives and government policies. Chapter 7 scrutinizes local actors’ entrapment in scale mismatches rising from the environmental impacts of the Yuxi-Mohan section of the China-Laos Railway. Chapter 7 discovers that local communities’ environmental concerns are less likely to be addressed compared to national and regional ones, particularly when it is unclear which actor should take responsibility for a given environmental problem. The dissertation makes theoretical and empirical contributions to studies in the political geography of environmental governance and Global China. It reveals how environmental governance, particularly when being formulated in non-Western contexts, encloses and regulates state and non-state power exercises and relations across spaces and scales. Such work is timely, given China’s growing role in determining the norms of global governance and sustainable development.