LOO: Geopolitical Futures and China’s ‘Revival’ of the Silk Roads for the 21st Century

all right good morning and welcome to the second lecture in the 2020-21 levy series uh today we'll have dr tim winter from the university of western australia to speak to us on silk road and china's use of geocultural power to pursue its interest along with bri and other projects in a way this is a good follow-up to our first lecture for those of you who attended it you remember the speaker talked about geography as a way of thinking in space similarly to how history was a way to help you think in time and on today's topic we're looking essentially at a way how the chinese are using history to act in in space and access geography so it's maybe more underground follow-up to what we heard about last week so in a minute i'll turn it over to tim and then once the lecture's over we'll unmute you and just raise your hands and uh tim will take questions as they come in so without any further ado uh tim winter thanks chris and um hopefully everybody can hear me uh and and thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you all i think this is going to be a really interesting session hopefully it will connect with the other themes of the course um and offer some uh different ways of thinking about how to think about international affairs so as chris says i'm going to be looking at china's as it says in that title revival of the silk roads and of course this is playing out in the context of um the belt and road initiative so what i want to do um for the next uh i guess 40 minutes or so is speak to this quote here which is from a a new book by philips and roo smith schmidt which is called um culture and audit in world politics if anybody wants to look that up and as they say there with notable exceptions ir scholars continue to write about culture as though nothing new has been said since the 1950s and for their part cultural specialists have done little to pay more little to apply their more recent insights to the issues that most concern ir scholars not least questions of international order so i'm a sociologist and i kind of think i really sit in between these two and i guess i tried to bridge that divide and have done for the last couple of decades and and one of the ways in which i'm doing that and have been doing that for the last few years is to address what's going on in the belt and road initiative and i imagine all of you or most of you will be familiar with this in one form or another it's a project that was launched in 2013 um observers around the world have been struggling to understand how to think about this belt and mode initiative it was originally called one belt one road um that's been renamed and it's in its english version in the last few years and these are types of maps that you see that represent this project and and these are the types of maps and diagrams and graphics that get presented in reports in think tank uh publications in journalistic studies and and in other types of publications and in here you see this idea of this overland and the maritime silk road which is obviously the one belt in the one road that is supposedly being revived for the 21st century um now i think there's something really interesting going on there and hopefully i will be able to communicate that to you today so what we've seen in the academic world is um an explosion to give a not for a better word of academic production around how to think about this belt mode initiative and as you see from these small sample of publications there are a variety of themes that get discussed but invariably the focus is on belt and road as a geopolitical project a geo not economic or geostrategic project but the focus overwhelmingly uh being given to trade infrastructure and transnational and trans regional forms of connectivity across maritime and land-based domains however i've been sort of observing um another theme and this is what i'm going to talk about for you this morning but in those um uh those stylistic representations of this uh of the two sweeping curves of the overlander maritime silk road what that also uh really kind of um belies the complexity of is the the ways in which china has been producing and leading a diplomatic architecture around its belt and road countries so here's a few of the types of trips that have xi jinping has been leading since 2013 in the bottom row you see their visits to kazakhstan but also to the asian infrastructure investment bank on the right hand side there and to the left of putin but also to uh to the unesco to launch this both as a bilateral and a multilateral uh way yeah did you switch your slides i'm not on your same slide i'm on where there's a grid of photographs is that not showing no it's not showing ah that's annoying it seems frozen okay sharing is paused it says resume share that's odd okay i been deactivated as host or i don't know uh no sir you should still be a host it should still be able to um to share i'll stop share and i'll restart it uh let's try no okay let's try another one there it is is that working kim yep i've got to do now is just get it to go full screen does that work yes yeah okay so it says your screen sharing right so so i'm not sure where you got to but [Music] there were the kind of types of publications which i hopefully you saw yep that's where we lost it yeah okay so there was only one slide ahead of that so um so this is what i was talking about in terms of the both types of bilateral multilateral uh um initiatives that has been launched under the under the uh belt and road agenda and of course um to speak to that issue of the focus within academia around infrastructure and trans regional connectivities this is uh this is a washington-based uh think tank that's been tracking uh the uh projects that china's been funding around the eurasian continent and down into east africa um and many of them now um are have either been rebranded or or discussed and um and uh funded as belt and road projects since 2013. so you can see the scale of connectivity and investments that china's making around a number of regions however what gets far less attention is the other cultural projects and this use of history this idea of the silk roads um partly because they don't uh attract the multi-billion dollar contracts that the infrastructure projects do but also because they're seen as uh somewhat trivial less strategically significant and so on and so forth however as i say and and the book i will show you later is is an attempt to show suggests is far more going on here than has been acknowledged so far so in terms of uh these cultural projects what's how do we understand the significance of this is one of the questions which a number of people are now starting to really address so here's a story from this week's foreign affairs or this most recent publication of foreign affairs which came out yesterday which is uh by oday westad which a yale historian of the cold war which discusses as you can see from that title um what makes uh china tick and and why does the us still struggle to understand china in some certain respects so as an opening line or actually that that clip is taken from halfway down the article but it asserts that china's policy is driven by a toxic mix of nationalism and past grievances now that discussion of past grievances obviously uh invariably focuses on the century of humiliation as it's called within the modern uh period of chinese history however what it doesn't uh begin to also um address is the other types of history that are figuring into chinese both domestic policies and its international agenda so for that we need to look into articles such as this one which is a uh around chinese political nostalgia and the idea of the the dream of the great rejuvenation this has been a project that's been a number of years in the making and this article gives a very good example of that which focuses on the use and and privileging of deep histories now and the glorification of a chinese civilization and what we're seeing then is is a conflation between the modern polity that is the chinese the prc the chinese or china as a country as we understand it today with its its uh um political boundaries and its institutions and the idea of a chinese or science civilizational space in east asia those are as james millward writes it's um they're not so easy to align that we're seeing a political project of doing that in the 21st century under xi jinping and and therefore a number of chinese commentators and academics are privileging the idea of a civilizational state that has many qualities and uh and understandings that can lead international affairs and speak to the global agendas of the 21st century so in that respect what we're also seeing uh is huge investments in china into this revival of this cultural past and this civilizational past and a great pride in this deep cultural history of the country so here's an example from xi'an in northwest china and this is a city that's celebrated as the gateway of the silk road and the structure you can see in the far distance is the pagoda of swanson where buddhism enter china or supposedly into china um centuries ago so this is a public square that has been built in the last decade or so it's just one of many many examples of urban planning that now speaks to this pride and rejuvenation of this deep cultural past and so i think there's something particularly significant going on there at the domestic level and the amount of funds that are being invested in that so what you see in that example in xi'an is how it connects to this idea of the silk road now i'm sure many of you are familiar with the silk road but possibly not in any great detail it has this vague imaginary to it about camels crossing deserts between east and west trade routes between china and europe so it's it's very much this vague uh romanticized idea of history so one of the things i've been sort of understanding seeking to understand is how this idea came about in the modern world and so it's exploded in the international attention given to the silk roads in the last few years particularly on the back of belton road and if you go to amazon you'll see publication after publication after publication now talking about silk road histories uh this is the example of the international bestseller peter francophan's book with the subtitle of the new history of the world however in the next 15 minutes i'm going to give you a bit of sense where this concept of the silk roads has come from so back in 1870 or the early 1870s the german um geologist um and geographer ferdinand von richthofen who was also a baron traveled to china um sponsored in part by uh the german government and some american and british corporations with the prospect of building a trans-continental railway north west china there were heavy coal reserves and there was and europe and particularly germany was industrializing fast there was anxieties about impending conflicts and so coal was obviously part of the critical energy infrastructure of the late 19th century von richthofen had been in surveying in the in the u.s in the years preceding this for the transcontinental railway which again i'm sure many of you are familiar with so he was sponsored to try and survey northwest china for a route that would connect all the way across to europe but he was also interested in history and so on his return to uh european to a german university he published a number of uh publications over over the subsequent decades in a multi-volume series called china the first of which included a chapter um called wither with in german uh the german equivalent of the silk roads this spoke to um some uh chinese sources that he had found in china and some european documentation um very extremely vague and uh circumspect about the trade route between uh europe enduring and particularly the roman empire and han dynasty china um so the two centuries either side of the birth of christ or the life of christ and the trade routes which were fragmented broken up but but there were a number of connections that seemed to be historically passed down on knowledge about those being historically passed down of those connections um during that kind of a roman empire han dynasty period but what he was offering was a very very small glimpse of pre-modern eurasian connectivities and focused primarily on northwest china as it is today and central asia but the coining of that term didn't really gain any currency in academia and it only really began to gain uh some uh visibility in europe particularly in the public imagination in the 1930s there were a number of reasons for that some of his students published books notably the swedish explorer sven hayden who was a great writer a great expedition uh or traveller and he was sponsored by lufthansa in the 1930s to scope out potential um airports up in northwest china for linking again and peaking to to western europe through a multi-stop air airline route or airport route so in that time as you see from this engram that was the moment when the circuit begins to enter the public imagination but that's what that slide also uh illustrates is um uh it doesn't really gain currency until the 1980s so um sorry i should have shown that size that that slide is the uh expeditions that were taking place in the 1930s including defense hayden sven hayden's trip that gave popularity to this idea of a transcontinental route if we go back to that slide um what you see during the cold war is that the current the idea of a trans-regional transcontinental history really has very little currency um there are geocultural cleavages of the cold war and so uh western academic scholars are not able to get into soviet states to to build on the research of the 1920s and 30s that was beginning to gain momentum and so it only really surfaces again uh at the end of the cold war and and the need to write a history a pre-modern history of globalization that kind of offered some interpretation to what was going on in the 1990s however there was one country that did continue to invest some energy and had interest in the silk roads and that was japan so what happened in japan after the second world war was um the country needed to rebuild its relations with its south east asian neighbors and with china uh after the after the uh devastating um uh events of of that second world war in the east asian theater of the conflict so the silk roads became this uh platform to rebuild sino-japanese relations what you see there in those two central slides is tanaka's visit to mao in peaking 72 just after nixon visited upon which the proposal happened of a documentary that would trace the silk roads between east asia or china and japan that was made in that by the two state broadcasters nhk and cctv in the mid 1970s and broadcast around the world in the early 1980s japan or tokyo hosted the the first olympics after in asia after the second world war and the uh the carrier of the flag um as you see there who was a was born on the day of the bombing of the the topic bombing the dropping of the atomic bomb and hiroshima carried the silk road or a number of people obviously carried along what was termed the southern silk road through a number of countries from athens as it made its way across to east asia for the in the run-up in the weeks running up to that olympic event so what we see is that the silk road starts to gain visibility as its trans regional trans cultural history but it also enters an arena of international diplomacy and this really takes off at the end of the cold war when the un uh are concerned with rebuilding uh international relations and obviously the uh east west and reducing suspicions between east and west and so the silkworth gains this currency to tell the story of peaceful harmonious relations between regions between countries and between civilizations so so unesco runs a decade-long project from 1988 to the 1997 which involves a whole series of events including conferences scholarly publications museum exhibitions um and uh and uh journalistic reports in a mult in a multitude of countries from south america right across to northern europe now what also took place were a number of expeditions and that's what this map here demonstrates and these were again tracing this these pre-modern connections and very much privileging not the story of empires and conflict and piracy but a story of peaceful harmonious connections the story of spice roots the story of of a trade of silk and and merchants crossing oceans and frontiers and also seafaring history so it was very much a romanticized nostalgia of pre-modern eurasian history what we see there then which is also quite interesting is this dramatic expansion of the geographies of the silk road from from uh von richthofen's original notion in the 1870s of a singular route that connects uh north west china around that area that's arumchi and huang across to southern europe but now we have it uh spanning up into japan down through the red sea and all the way down to southeast asia there were reasons why that happened which i won't go into but i can uh recommend some publications later if anybody's interested in that and what we also see then is the idea of the maritime silk road entering international policy or international cultural policy for the first time so when that ship you see in this top left there is the lama which was lent to the u.n by the sultan of oman during the first gulf war of 1990 to 1991 with that with the country not wanting to be drawn into into that conflict and wanted to be seen as part of the international community promoting peace around the region so he lent the ship to uh to the u.n where it left venice went through the suez canal flying the flag of the united nations all the way across to the korean peninsula and into southern japan telling the story of uh peaceful relations peaceful maritime uh connectivities that should be restored in a post-cold war era uh journalists and academics were on board uh lots of lots of lectures were given and and these journalists obviously wrote these up for for the global media now post 911 the silk road story returns to central asia and and southern asia on the back of 9 11 the events of 9 11. so what you see in the bottom left and right hand side there are is the uh washington mall the smithsonian institute runs a silk roads roads of dialogue um exhibition through the their summer exhibition uh in the year immediately after after 9 11 so 2002 and this is what i would suggest potential potentially the most strategically important sort of public and diplomatically significant public space in the world so this was telling the story of central asia and the muslim world is not necessarily just the source of extreme fundamentalist islam but also a region of peaceful cultural connectivities it stretches back centuries so it was it was trying to present another narrative of that region this also gets picked up in the united nations again so kotami uh the iranian leader post 911 also signals this language of the dialogue of civilizations and at that time um koichiro matsura was a director general of unesco at that time and he was instrumental in in leading that roads of dialogue uh projects during the 1980s that was led by unesco so he supports his dialogue of civilizations and the silk roads is a good example of of um of one of the ways in which that language should be uh given a geographical and historical form so whilst huntington was talking about the clash of civilizations there were organizations around the world that were trying to shift the language and and the relationship between civilizational histories and international relations in a much more positive um and uh productive way and obviously organizations like the un were part of that so what we see though um then and one of the things i've been arguing the last few years is that from that uh initial 1870s idea of phone number richtofen's notion of a silk route in his quite narrow conception of this idea of silk trade between han dynasty china and the roman empire we've seen this dramatic expansion both in time where the quintessential silk road traveler in in europe is marco polo but marco polo doesn't travel to the 13th century so we have this history this one term that spans now 2 000 or even 3 000 years um and an entire continent and oceans so one of the things i think what we've seen and what i've tried to indicate to you in the last few minutes is that it comes it comes to be associated with certain ideals and values the ideas of cross-cultural dialogue peace and cooperation peaceful relations and dialogue between civilizations the idea that cosmopolitan is a good thing for humanity and is an is it is an historical natural order in the post-cold war it's about telling the story of peaceful east-west uh relations and creating those forms of dialogue and also the ways in which we can have inter-polity relations so the silkworth becomes this uh powerful way to to narrate those types of histories um in the modern era and of course what we've seen then is that in the age of belt and road china and xi jinping is co-opting this for a very strategic and what is perhaps the most ambitious foreign policy agenda ever launched by a single country so there you see um xi jinping visiting unesco less than six months after the launch of belton road saying that uh civilizations are the future of uh of peaceful international affairs and that china can lead the way in this and the silk road is the demonstration of china's peaceful engagement with the region with its own region and with other regions historically such as europe and the african continent now um that map there is a is a more familiar map in terms of what you might see again in in in a number of academic and think tank publications of the economic and developmental corridors of belton road uh and the the new eurasia land bridge and these are critical um in terms of how china has uh in a 2015 report strategized how to uh direct his investments across these different regions and that blue dotted line is the maritime silk road of the 21st century as it's often documented but what we've also seen is an increase as i mentioned in the cultural sector and what we and that what these number of dots show you here are the uh locations that are now being identified by the unesco organizations and its advisory bodies such as ikemos which is based in paris of all the locations that could and should be designated as silk road world heritage sites now world heritage you may think is just a a a particular brand and a um a brand for promoting tourism and and managing and profiteering from that but for a number of countries whether it's iran china india this has become the cultural olympics it demonstrates civilizational histories it demonstrates pride that speaks back to those areas of of empire and colonialism same with a whole series of countries around the world so it has a really deep political investment in different regions and so this idea of uh rather than signaling this is a particular uh historically important site for one country the silk road says that these places are historically important because they they show a whole series of historical religious cultural um connectivities or scientific connectivities so the uh the blue dots were listed in 2014 as a transnational trans boundary nomination where china joined up with kazakhstan and kyrgyzstan and created a buddhist corridor that runs up through north west china into into those neighboring countries which is one of the first uh trans-boundary silk road uh nominations to actually be listed and what we're seeing now is a whole series of countries grouping together in in regional configurations to to bring those other dots whether it's green or red ones that um into further silk road nominations we're going to see that over the coming years what that doesn't tell you obviously is the maritime silk road so there's a there's a whole another policy agenda to to produce reporting and a policy initiative that would match that overland for the next 20 to 30 years that balance out that maritime history to world history but what this begins to show you then is how this this historical idea of the silk road overlays with the with the developmental corridors of belton road this is important because china has about 150 million chinese tourists going out every year before covert and that will resume no doubt after covert borders and international borders resume over the next four to five years and this has huge economic power to it i'll come back to that later but it's not only in terms of uh on the ground development but i'll give you some examples why i think this is much more than just soft power because of the the the ways in which this now folds in the digital economies of countries and and the 5g technologies and digital silk road platforms that china's rolling out through belton road but i'll come back to that shortly so as well as that hard infrastructure on the ground of silk road histories that you can see within um uh archaeological and historic urban landscapes that get transformed into world heritage we're also seeing a uh an explosion of cultural activities around festivals field festival food and film festivals theater alliances telling the story of silk road connectivities now this is very much an invented history you could argue given that the term only goes back 130 or so years but what we're seeing is a whole number of countries jumping on this um to demonstrate and try and argue and to the population to their own populations and to an international community that they were friends 1300 years ago or a thousand years ago they were friends on the silk road and the reviving the silk road for the 21st century is about reviving friendships and trust and trade and dialogue this has powerful connotations in in a number of regions where it's being framed all this cultural stuff is being framed as a dialogue of asian civilizations so in the west the silk road history is often seen as a east-west connectivity but in asia it's seen as an intra regional asia the histories of connections between uh uh the arab world the the buddhist world and so on and so forth this is really powerful language today where reviving the silk roads is about reviving these non-western uh pride these non-western geographies these non-resting trade relations that have um that is proclaimed to be that were suppressed through uh centuries or eras of european colonialism and our world system that put europe at the center of international trade and and geopolitics so this idea of reviving historical connections is far more powerful than i think most uh people in the west have taken credit or given credit to in the last few years so what we see here is an example of a museum not in china but in singapore so this is a number of countries that are responding to this language about maritime socrate i emphasize this terminology only really goes back 30 years but this is uh this is being picked up by a number of countries signaling to their own populations that singapore's place in the world needs to return to the sea this is strategically important this is critical for a country like singapore with the belt and road infrastructure programs potentially cutting it out of the trans-continental shipping routes that it's been so powerfully engineering in the last few decades so here's an example of of a public diplomacy project within the singaporean geographies of uh of it of the city state now what we're also seeing is investments uh in china's uptake around the maritime archaeology and one level that seems quite trivial but the if you take those two gray circles there what we're seeing is a convergence between where the belt and road infrastructure projects are happening and the cultural sector projects around around the silk road histories and in this case it's kenya and sri lanka and the maritime archaeology projects that china is now leading in those two regions that converge with its bigger belt and road partners so what we see uh in countries like sri lanka is this idea of rewriting uh regional histories where it's beneficial for china to say that it was a center of a civilizational zone that uh china is a maritime historical power and a peaceful one um on par with any european maritime power historically but also for countries like sri lanka this helps them place themselves within an indian ocean uh past and future that has massive strategic benefits the the language of reviving the silk roads of the 21st century is all about reviving peaceful connectivities sufficient for sri lanka for a small country like sri lanka this helps them rekindle ideas of a peaceful indian ocean zone which was their contribution to the non-alignment not aligned movement during the cold war as you see in these in this slide here so picking up the themes that china's pushing through the baltimore initiative and this idea of reviving peaceful inter-polity relations intercultural relations historically this is very productive for a small country like sri lanka as it maneuvers between the european union china india and the us in the 21st century so what we're therefore witnessing is huge investments in uh in maritime underwater archaeology and port histories in china so those are the uh uh examples of institutions that have opened in the cun in the country over the last few years this is a dramatic shift for china in embracing its maritime past in a way that uh it distance itself from obviously given these uh associations that the sea has in in in terms of the century of humiliation the treaty poor system that was set up through the british um during the mid 19th century so this is china revisiting the oceans and the seas around it um in terms of its own projections of the past into the future so this is coupled with significant investments and for deep water underwater and ocean bed searching about a month ago i think i'm writing saying uh china has now uh had a crude submersible that's reached the bottom the deepest part of the ocean's floor um and setting the world record for this and so what we're also seeing in terms of space exploration china's uh ex investing heavily in ocean bed exploration as i'm sure many of you are aware and part of that is a search for shipwrecks across the south china sea and the indian ocean and i would refer you to the work of jeff adams who's been writing some really interesting stuff over the last six or seven years and the important strategic importance of uh shipwreck archaeology in in china's historical claims towards the south china sea so whilst there's a lot of attention and media attention around islands and infrastructure basis there's other stuff going on as well that doesn't receive the the press that it deserves so what that slide there shows you is the nanhai one museum in southern china that is a wreck that was found in the south side in the south china sea that now has its own dedicated museum so you might think these are just individual museums but china's been undertaking an extraordinary explosion of museums around its country uh four thousand opened four thousand one hundred opened over a six to seven year period it now has more than five thousand museums up from the just 375 in the uh 1970s so this is a dramatic uptake in is revaluing its revisiting of its history now i'm sure many of you would be familiar with often it's um countries such as china doesn't do these things for on a whim there are particular strategic reasons why it might be investing this scale of funds into that cultural policy now what this slide begins to give you an example of is the ways in which this idea of a maritime past is being connected to the future so those meta tags all those key words you see at the bottom eco cities belt mode initiatives junghyun coastal china temples smart cities the maritime silk road this is very much about saying this is a maritime past this is a maritime future for the country now why is that significant well i'll give you a sense of that in a second but it's accompanied with this big investment in public sculptures again perhaps potentially very trivial these are these have uh emerging over the last 10 to 15 years whether it's admirals such as jungheur or sea goddesses that tell the story of the spread of religion and china's outward uh connections to the arab world to the persian world and so on and so forth that are being rekindled for the 21st century we are sealed we are seeing children's cartoons this this one on the maritime silk road won the best tv uh program just a month ago in china why is it why is a children's television program significant well i'll bring you to the example of britain um i grew up in the uk and uh and trafalgar square that you see on the in that slide was central to my sort of schooling education and i didn't understand that as a child of why that's significant but reading this book a number of decades later which i guess some of you are familiar with if not all of you it tells a story of c power states and the book very much differentiates between c power and the idea of a c and a c state um and i quote from page six and what do you what basically andrew lambert identifies there have been five powers in in history that have defined themselves for for a sea culture and um and a maritime culture and that's athens carthage venice the dutch republic and britain and i quote from page six where he states that in the contemporary world today and that's today russia china and the united states all possess sea power a strategic option that can be exercised by any state with a coast money and manpower but these continental military military superpowers are not sea powers the sea is at best a marginal factor in their identities and so the whole book really traces out what that difference between a continental power and a c power is so i think when i give those examples of public art children's uh television around maritime histories that explosion of museums a number of which are then now dedicated to the to the uh maritime histories what we might be seeing in china in the 21st century is a cultivation of a sea culture and the transformation of china not just into a continental power but also into a sea power in the way that andrew landers described in his book now it's where these silk clothes and this idea of a maritime silk or an overland silk road is gaining currency and why it's particularly powerful i think in 21st century international affairs is that it's being picked up by a whole series of intergovernmental organizations and intergovernmental bodies so you see a few examples of that here and this this brings me back to that idea of the uh the the ways in which the ideas and values and associations that the silk road has had attached to it and become associated with the term in the 20th century around into peaceful relations harmonious trade harmonious intercultural dialogue so on and so forth so these countries now are very much pushing this on the back of the belt and road initiative so unesco is spending heavily investing heavily in bringing in multilateral programs for this silk roads program and i encourage you to go to their site um to illustrate to give you a sense of the of the themes that they're pushing now they have 18 themes so this is now being seen by unesco in paris as uh phase two from the end of that cold war multilateral program of the silk roads uh they've now in in the age of belt and road opening up their phase two and building these uh multi-sector whether it's science education culture or in this case from this slide you see here exchanges and histories of medicine and chemistry which has been accelerated because of covid so unesco as with other un agencies very much foregrounding international cooperation and international dialogue and their anxiety is about the closing of international borders with with um uh covet and i spoke to the director of this program yesterday who who indicated that the silk roads for them is is now a project to indicate that transnational trans regional transcontinental exchange trade is always the natural state of affairs it's historical state of affairs that's being undermined by covert and it's a state of affairs that we should be returning to in a post-covered world so uh what would also this program does which being pushed by unesco but also un habitat unhcr and other organizations within the un system is the idea of the silk roads can produce forms of dialogue between uh the youth of the world so this is an example of the youth eyes um that uh uh is now being framed uh as though it's silk roads project which is about generating international dialogue between younger generations across borders and so the silk road then also plugs into the un's sdgs the 17 goals that it's identified for the next decade or so that about poverty reduction into cultural dialogue addressing climate change and so all of these agendas are being plugged into this into this silk road program across the un system primarily through unesco but by other agencies as well [Music] and brings us back to those belt and road developmental corridors and reducing poverty through tourism and so on and so forth so what i'm giving you a sense here then is that um uh you might read in a number of us washington-based think-tank publications that china has hardly any soft power but the presentation i'm suggesting to this morning is that through this silk roads initiatives china's got a lot more soft power than we may think and it's using the un and international agencies to do that what i also want to do just in the final few minutes is to say that this is more than just soft power than we're seeing here today um i'll give you example of of tourism and why i think that has uh significant political implications are more than just a nai's notion of soft power in the 21st century so this report here was published last year by the unwto the world tourism organization that identified the idea of a maritime silk road for the 21st century around uh connectivities for infrastructure investment around tourism east asia particularly china and japan have the world's fastest growing ship cruise ship market and that's obviously been suspended because of covid but surprisingly the cruise ship markets rebounding uh quicker than you would expect through um as borders and and mobilities reopen um in the in the post covert transition world particularly in east asia and so these are locations which are the cruise ship ports and uh identifiers that should be the locations for this maritime silk road cruise ship industry now this is very much extending this idea of a maritime sea history outwards from china to show that china again it's its influence stretches across the mediterranean which stretches across the indian ocean all the way across to the mediterranean up the red sea up to the sewers canal and this is telling the story of a chinese historical connectivities in a peaceful benign way but also the spread of chinese civilization and the positive impact it's had historically and therefore encouraging the 1.4 billion people to get behind the belt and road initiative and see the legitimacy of the state's agenda for this extremely ambitious and therefore risky uh foreign policy uh program of belton road now where that's more than just soft power is that this uh the huge infrastructure programs that are coming around this a number of countries wholly depend or cities particularly but a number of countries heavily if not wholly depend on on international tourism so this slide here is from malacca which is one of the key infrastructure nodes of the belton road project in southeast asia in malaysia and as you see from that top left that's an urban development project that's part of the nine billion dollar gateway malacca program that's part of a deep water port just out from singapore but also is about um uh the connections of the maritime silk road historically where junghwa's voyages in the 15th century the chinese emerald sailed across from southern china stopped off in malacca as he as he voiced onwards to in to across the indian ocean down into east africa so this and there's a number of overseas chinese in in malaysia and malacca in particular who want to celebrate these uh histories and profit profit economically from the tourism that this these types of histories will generate if we turn to the black sea region this is the black sea economic cooperation organization that is pushing silk road tourism to to lure that part of that outbound chinese uh market to the west asia region and the southern europe region this is being supported by again by the unwto the world tourism organization which is coming up with the idea of a western silk road which draws this uh geography of connectivity and this idea of of romanticized pre-modern connectivities and trade that is not about conflict that's not about the conflicts of the modern era in the balkans region that's that's tore this uh black sea region apart in the last 30 or so years but is it is celebrating histories of peaceful intercultural inter-religious dialogue to to promote tourism and relations within the region but also uh to capture that east asian market that has big infrastructure implications for for cruise ship industries and the port investments in the black sea region and and in the mediterranean as that will unfold over the next 20 to 30 years but what we're also seeing then is is the ways in which um for the u.s market uh for tourists visiting internationally or for european tourists that will be google there will be we sorry be whatsapp it will be a whole suite of uh mobile app econo programs that will be underpinning supporting an international tourism market um the airbnb phenomena and so on and so forth that we've all become familiar with the last few years but in the chinese world of international tourism there's a whole app ecology and a mobile app world economy that um that these countries such as turkey such as bulgaria are now being encouraged to be drawn into um so what you see that slide is a number of chinese think tanks so they're offering advice to these countries in southern europe to say if you want to be visible on this hugely profitable chinese outbound tourism ministries you need to be on this app economy on the wechat programs promoting your country your locations your industries to this outbound chinese market so here's some examples it's not just about tourism promotion it's been about international uh platform uh payment platforms um and that's been obviously a kind of a significant geopolitical dimension of the 20th century in terms of the the influence that visa and mastercard have had and the and the affordances they've had for the western financial systems and china is now trying to counter that with its own international payment system such as alipay and wechat and so on and so forth that are enticing these countries to draw into that into that sphere and as you can see there um then the huge scale of uh um usage of these uh of these uh apps of the uh for the outbound chinese tourists um and and giving credibility to those claims that if you're not on these systems um you are invisible now what that's more than just payment structures that's more about international finance um it's also bringing new way new ways to think about big data systems uh the link heritage tourism development cultural dialogue into this new world of ai big data gathering so here's a number of uh well here's just one example of that um this being linked to smart cities international marketing of these cities and uh and the whole ecosystems that we're seeing being uh built around this kind of international travel industry here's one uh final example that i give you from the armenian tourism industry that's about this supposedly a project that's about measuring customer satisfaction around silk road tourism in um uh in armenia which is in sort of the west asia central asia region but you might be interested to know that this travel insights program is being sponsored by the undp and the russian government so clearly there's some interesting developments happening here um and this use of big data through these industries through these connectivities through these uh um people-to-people exchanges that are part of the belt and mode initiative that is not reaching the international media and the critique that i think it deserves so finally i'm going to give you the counter to a lot of this china initiative which is one example among a number which comes from india which is the um the response of india in the last few years has been to say that well if if china's pushing this maritime silk road and the idea of an overland silk road as a strategic architecture um to build alliances in the 21st century we need to respond and their uh project to do that is project more some more psalm is the arabic word for monsoon winds so what this is a project to build a geostrategic block of around 20 to 25 countries around the indian ocean that puts indian the india with the center of uh strategic geography using histories um as to say that we have always been connected to this region again this is a domestic project and an international diplomacy project to say that um we have always been tied historically culturally religious connections and we should be reviving those for the 21st century whether it's down to south east asia or across to east africa so uh that's um uh been gaining momentum again in the last uh 12 months or so um and and i encourage you to sort of look at that because that's very much about uh india reconfiguring its strategic interests away from land-based invasions which was what it suffered over a number of centuries obviously towards um towards its maritime domain which is largely ignored in the uh recent decades strategically so that's it there's the publication that i've mentioned a couple of times geocultural power um that hopefully uh maps out a whole series of those themes and threads and um and there's a website that i've got up online that's called silkroadfutures.net which gives you a sense of some of those uh themes i've talked about this morning but also presents a number of those videos and that opens up to other themes um and and gives you some indication of other uh publications that are on there that um speak to the kind of topics i've been talking about thank you great thank you tim

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

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Id: uhf5kNxEEP8

Length: 51min 27sec (3087 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020