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

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. A field of power is defined by attempts to influence or capture social institutions such as banking systems and energy sectors, foster patron-client relations, and, as in the focus of this section, building infrastructural power or influence by connecting and channeling communications, electricity, movement of all kinds, and other basic materials of social life. While infrastructural power thus refers to the ways infrastructural configurations shape social life, it is also a relational form of power that often exceeds the abilities of social or state actors to control and determine its effects and outcomes. This does not diminish, however, the ways states like China have effectively wielded infrastructure investment and construction to enhance their influence over society and extend their authority, even beyond their territorial borders. In approaching global China as a field of power, we follow a line of thinking, laid out initially by Ching Kwan Lee (2018; 2022a), that seeks to move beyond treating global China as an empirical object comprised of strategies, policies and projects. Instead, we treat global China as an analytical concept, a way of understanding how (and how effectively) the Chinese state wields power. Chinese power abroad is of course multifaceted and cannot be restricted to state practices. The entrepreneurial activities throughout the world of small-scale traders, shopkeepers, and manufacturers has in fact been the dominant form of Chinese influence for centuries, especially in Southeast Asia, where many generations of China's diaspora have long shaped commercial development and social change in the region (Kian, 2015; Nyiri & Tan, 2017). Much of this ‘transnationalism from below’ (Dittgen, 2017) exists at the edges of the formal economy and has long blurred the line between licit and illicit activity (Rippa, 2020). But Chinese influence is felt not just through economic channels (see e.g. Ling & Segre-Reinach, 2021). While we recognize this diversity of influence, we focus our discussion on the state and larger transnational corporations because of their outsized role in infrastructure development in Southeast Asia. Lee proposed three domains of practice, or modes of power, that tend to characterize China's efforts to exert influence through its global investments and development projects, most of which have involved infrastructural construction of various sorts. These are economic statecraft, patron clientelism, and symbolic domination. The first of these—economic statecraft—involves the use of economic means to achieve political and/or diplomatic objectives which might include, for example, recognition of China's territorial claims. State-owned enterprises figure prominently here, though private firms can also play a fundamental role in China's economic statecraft, as do financial institutions. Indeed, perhaps the bluntest form of economic statecraft that captures considerable attention is the use of state-backed development financing to secure influence (the so-called ‘debt trap’ strategy). While some scholars have argued that much of the debt-trap discourse is driven by racialized fear of the West being displaced as the world's dominant development power and neglects the role played by states that seek Chinese-financed projects or fails to carefully examine the specific motivations of Chinese companies and agencies (Carmody, 2020; The Atlantic, 2021), it cannot be denied that debt financing remains a powerful tool of economic statecraft for China (see also Lai et al., 2020). Patron clientelism has been a basic practice of Chinese statecraft since at least the founding of the PRC (Walder, 1986; Oi, 1989) and probably well before that too. There are echoes of it in the so-called tributary system which, as Lin (2009) has argued, continued as an instrument of political expediency even after the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. It was also a long-standing political practice along China's internal southwestern frontier, where the tusi system of cultivating native chieftainship was adopted as an indirect form of rule for centuries (Herman, 1997; Crossley, et al., 2006). In more contemporary practice, patron clientelism involves cultivating uneven interpersonal relationships with key actors in places hosting (or potentially hosting) Chinese development projects. These relationships are meant to deliver material benefits (from China) in exchange for political allegiance (from hosts). They also often have the effect of bolstering the power of local officials. Of course, such relationships are not unique to China, but have perhaps played a comparatively large role in the extension of Chinese state power. Finally, symbolic domination might be considered as the exercise of influence by shaping people's common sense, disposition, and habits of thought. While we might often think of this as ‘soft power’, it is important to link efforts to influence and control the discourse about China as part of the state's efforts to dominate that discourse within China, rather than simply regarding it as a tool of foreign policy or external influence, as implied by the idea of soft power (Repnikova, 2022). Spectacular infrastructure projects, new town developments, and other large-scale developments financed and built by China throughout the Global South play an outsize role in constituting the symbolic dimensions of state power. Infrastructure is, indeed, central to all of these modes of power. It is the most common ‘material benefit’ deployed by China in exchange for political objectives, and through which patron client relationships are cultivated. The example of technological standards provides just one illustration of this. China's ability to shape international technical standardization in a global arena of power competition has become significant. Rühlig (2022) argues that it not only helps Chinese companies but also the state more broadly, by creating lock-in effects in which host countries must rely on Chinese suppliers to maintain and further build-out their railway networks. This may be the case, for instance, in Indonesia as a result of the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail, in Laos, and in Ethiopia. In addition, China's projects are often regarded as symbolic markers of status and modernity in recipient countries, helping to forge popular associations of China with progress, development, and hopeful futures. As observed by Turner and her colleagues (Turner et al., 2023), China is clearly viewed as a viable avenue toward ‘modernity’ for many Southeast Asian countries, even if it remains dogged by a popular perception in some places of mass-producing cheap and poor-quality goods. Infrastructural power, however, has multiple forms that in some ways extend beyond ideas of national development. To understand this excess, we also treat infrastructural power as a relational form of power that does not emerge simply from ‘the state’ in a unidirectional way. In this, we note the way infrastructural power might be understood as a materialist reframing of what Foucault called ‘biopower’, in which power is emergent within and among the relations between the myriad organizations, institutions, technologies, and other apparatus that regulate and control or discipline bodies and populations. Thus, infrastructural power entails not simply state policies and strategies but a diverse collection of organizations, firms, regulatory bodies, expert systems, financial institutions, and standards. To these we could also add the materials of these infrastructures themselves: concrete, steel, wire, and even immaterial components, such as wireless signals. 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