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. The 'socio-technical assemblages' that constitute infrastructural forms (Anand et al., 2018) can be understood as having the power to shape outcomes in ways that might vary from the straightforward political objectives of policy actors. Approaching global China as a field of power has bearing on a key question that animates much of the discussion in the papers collected here: to what extent can a distinct 'China model' of development be identified when considering the on-the-ground characteristics of China's infrastructure development projects in Southeast Asia? This question comes up for a number of reasons. China has at different times both eschewed and promoted the idea of a distinct China model. Although Deng Xiaoping famously admonished other countries to not follow China's model (as part of the Chinese state's efforts to promote self-determination and solidarity among Third World nations), a stance that has been repeated by Chinese leaders over the years, including Xi Jinping, there are clearly aspects of China's state-led development and modernization experience that it uses to support all three modes of power that it exerts abroad. China has grown increasingly confident in articulating a counter-vision of a poly-centric global order not dominated by the West or by the unfettered neoliberalism of global capitalism. While this vision is in some ways offered, and interpreted, as a model, the view from the ground reveals a more pragmatic approach that is seldom ideologically driven (Tang, 2020). China's approach, in short, is always embedded and localized in host countries. Tritto and Camba (2022) point out that the 'Shekou model'—named after one of the first industrial parks established in the 1980s in the Pearl River Delta—has shaped the way industrial parks in Southeast Asia have been built (with a dedicated port, residential compounds, seclusion and separated services for employees). But these parks are also highly localized by host country development priorities and by the politics that such parks generate. What China does on the ground is thus always shaped by the conditions and situations in target countries. This does not need to be understood purely as a limitation on Chinese power, however. Nor is it that outcomes not matching the 'model' are necessarily indicators of the power of the countries and communities that host Chinese projects. Agency does not always translate into benefit. As Lesutis (2021) has pointed out in analysing Chinese railway construction projects in Kenya, host state visions of enhancing territorial power via mega-project infrastructure construction are diverted by the power of Chinese companies' interference with local development objectives. But Chinese companies do not always get their way either, as made clear for instance in Dourado's (2023) critique of China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group's failed efforts to bypass local environmental regulations and other standards in its efforts to build the Brazil-Peru transcontinental railway. Harlan and Lu (2024) address the question of whether or how China exports its development model. They argue that what they call a 'cooperation-infrastructure nexus' establishes implicit narratives of a China model. This discursive model has material effects, but the outcome is always very different from what happened in China. Yet even discursively, the 'China model' remains vague for the same on-going reasons that led to Deng Xiaoping disclaiming any specific model that China sought to impose on other countries (thus, paradoxically, making it an attractive alternative 'model' compared to the West). In the specific cooperation programs they analyse in their paper, there are a variety of priorities and goals being pursued by a variety of actors. But there are some common attributes: self-reliance, governance capacity, technology innovation, and an infrastructural focus. This is similar to what has been argued by Lampton et al. (2020: 236) in their account of Chinese railway construction in Southeast Asia. They note that while there may not be a 'China model' there does seem to be a 'China approach' 'that marries strategic direction, relentless and a to with as as it and a to focus The specific focus of Harlan and a grounded and place-based analysis is for understanding how and to what extent Chinese projects in other countries China's efforts to an alternative to development, on its own development experience as a the same these projects also how China's efforts to promote such an alternative model are by the of local political This is not to that always to do their own way when with China. in Laos to China as a more development model, one of But is by and of the firms by the technological of the projects themselves, and by the laid by established of As Harlan and Lu point 'the technologies, and practices of the through cooperation are on the As and (2023) argue in their paper, does not capture the and within which Chinese development actors These need to be they point at multiple just and through various networks. Chinese development into an space shaped by relations between China and the same this is by much more than a debt As they have have become in a of transnational that shape the outcomes of China's and argue that attention to of of and over that an analysis of global China that beyond of 'debt and for surplus global China just the on the logics of global This is implied in the approach laid out by and and it is also by of the China cannot be understood as the of and bodies, and national borders and The idea of 'the as the of infrastructure power the question of the extent to which global China, as a field of power, is (or even by the logics (and of global capital. In the brief discussion thus we have emphasized the of the Chinese and we have a broader discussion regarding the in China (see along with other over the of global of state and (see e.g. et al., et al., 2022). In this context we are by that global China is driven by a different of that is focused less on on investment and more on the of for a variety of objectives. This approach a form of Chinese state that is both and to local Indeed, Lee argues that Chinese state is by local and in different ways when compared with the private that Chinese state was driven by objectives but it was more and than global private While these papers do not on the of global and how it to the Chinese state and to global China, they ways of how Chinese companies and agencies both seek to their own standards and for the global investment and development while at the same the and that they in these and the of a global that Chinese actors must with rather than Yet as and China's development practices to a of the logics (and of the is to most of what is and shaping global China. have been defined as technical projects with political objectives in the ways technological systems as for political or the political effects of socio-technical configurations of various such as systems has argued, in with this of 'that infrastructures as a of with technical These become infrastructures one technological system comes to dominate over or when systems into a As these material and immaterial and are into they into a with political In this is important in at least it and into via technological systems that are often from formal political institutions infrastructures of systems particular or of that into political and of these are to analysing the political effects of China's infrastructure projects. a approach is one to the political in and one that against 'the to understand politics in geopolitical and economic the of specific and than approaching the politics of China's projects in Southeast Asia as a form of economic statecraft or a of of which are of course analytical for at a more form of a more grounded and place-based approach to the ways political effects emerge in highly specific ways that have much to do with the social relations that technical is, in other a way of analysing how infrastructure projects can local political effects that both and their development. in some cases these political effects well beyond 'the In Harlan and paper, the of provides a discursive for China's investment projects in China's in broad not just the infrastructural but also and As soft by programs in practices and that and on where much of the articulating an alternative 'China model' These soft infrastructures have their own material effects for example, new and systems, and practices for over a long that can be from China. But the effects of the projects end up being highly and to with the of soft example, China as an infrastructure for but developments in Laos, as well as the for among construction firms and has in a toward larger and infrastructures a that throughout landscapes by relations between and This involves much more than just infrastructures but also new and other that the of within and beyond The effect of this is to how the and how they with the of market and such that the has become to market through with power at multiple In addition, investment in infrastructures have outcomes from technical and over The of such investments have in some ways been by into a producing region and thus enhancing the of surplus through But these in the and the socio-technical relations have their own political effects, most in terms of over to infrastructure governance has into a for Cambodia over after the project is built and the Chinese its and a national investment objectives have been while a more local form of politics Infrastructural configurations also the politics the construction of the in ways that are perhaps As and argue in this special section, popular about the have been shaped more by its effects rather than historical toward is the on-the-ground of this project and the its construction that have many against historical were also by the While the a symbolic as construction was dominated by and These tend to in any but the material of the construction a politics of modernization that been in the producing a of in line with of The was part of the for a more dominated by and China's to in this vision and thus to the broad by the project the of a the papers in this special section seek to in various ways Chinese investment multiple and of and landscapes of historical change that the effects of to the spatial dimensions of China's infrastructure investments in Southeast Asia is important since investments tend to be understood simply at national and global of states and capitalism. This is not just a question of for a but more for the multiple that are established by infrastructural A grounded, place-based in other is not restricted to the local by any but how local effects This approach is most explored by and Yi, but all of the projects in the papers rail, multiple in terms of their the political and policy that and the social and political effects that There are distinct agencies with different and that and upon these projects. some of these can be called even if China is the of the Thus, attention to spatial dimensions provides a analytical tool for understanding the and relational of China's infrastructure power and how these effects that can vary from the policies and strategies that seek to that power for China's benefit. the same attention to temporal dimensions is The outcomes of the Chinese investments explored in these papers often the that infrastructures, political organizations, and economic have These can infrastructures in and systems in or construction that development toward larger and larger projects rather than that may be more in and There are of course many different ways of the temporal dimensions of and the field has long been engaged in how infrastructures shape of and progress, and how different infrastructural configurations different temporal of and These are not only by policy or and other but also by the of the materials themselves. also the ways infrastructures may be and over The of technologies, the need for and are an important part of the of infrastructural The China Made project was with the of the of what called the world's infrastructure state in much of the infrastructure studies We that this was in to the in the China studies field This has been to within the field for but it has only been with the of a more global China that new analytical and have how it might be to (see e.g. Oakes, & 2022). The papers in this special section in various ways how the relational of infrastructures provides a for analysing China's increasingly global the of that to a move remains all common as the China studies field the of China's political economy into global of and infrastructure as to a global field of power is important for understanding the ability of Chinese actors to influence national and systems in the global primary of China's Belt and Road in a understanding of the way the domestic political at local and national the of technology and It also the way the of and in China's domestic economy to the world of this toward a global and that is and thus in forms of The social life of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia is a that is and that will always But understanding some of the primary domains of practice and modes of power that these infrastructural systems some important of focus for their effects and the life of infrastructures in We would like to our for the 2021 and The at the Asia Research Institute special for their technical and China Made is by The and the for Asian at the University of support was by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and the Asian Institute at the University of We would also like to all of the workshop made the online the between Finally, to for support the of this

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