Seeing China’s Belt and Road

Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China’s signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China’s Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different ＂downstream＂ contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China’s Belt and Road shows the BRI’s dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China’s rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.

Edward Schatz is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Centre for the European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. He is the author of Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia (2021), Modern Clan Politics (2004), as well as the editor of Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009).

Rachel Silvey is Professor of Geography and Planning and Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her work has been published in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development studies. Her research has focused on migration, gender, and development in Indonesia, as well as Southeast Asian migration to the Gulf States and North America. She is currently researching labor migration associated with BRI projects in South East Asia, as well as the migration regimes associated with the expansion of plantations in South East Asia.