Mark Frazier recently interviewed Min Ye on the publication of her new book, The Belt Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China: 1998-2018 (Cambridge University Press, 2020, and available for purchase here). Min is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University; ICI External Advisory Board member, ICI 2014 Emerging Scholar; and the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR), and institutions in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Her earlier books include Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (CUP, 2014) and, with Kent Calder, The Making of Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press, 2010).
Mark Frazier: Congratulations on the publication of The Belt Road and Beyond. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), since its launch in 2013, has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers. Besides being heavily investigated, it’s also a topic with literally a global reach in potential research field sites. What convinced you to start a project on the BRI and tell the story from a domestic perspective, where your research was primarily within China?
Min Ye: Many people started to research China’s BRI after the Chinese leadership promoted its strategy at the APEC [Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation] summit in Beijing in November 2014; since then they have focused on the political leadership’s ambitious rhetoric and China’s large infrastructure projects abroad. My research, by contrast, started earlier and was based on observations of political-economic developments inside China.
From 2012 to 2013, the Chinese state and economy were in crises. Politically, Bo Xilai’s downfall was a blow to the central leadership; the anti-corruption campaign silenced the rank-and-file officials. Economically, industrial overcapacity and financial tightening were happening simultaneously. Externally, China’s tension with maritime Asia was intensifying; the U.S encirclement from negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was succeeding. In this period, I observed how paralyzed the Chinese state was and how much trouble the economy was experiencing. I also witnessed how the BRI’s launch injected new life to the state and a new development fever in the Chinese economy. I was convinced that the BRI would be a significant undertaking in China, whether it succeeded or failed in achieving the ambitious rhetoric abroad.
In the following years, while outside observers dismissed the BRI as lacking substance or exaggerated its geostrategic impact, I persisted with my belief, and focused on investigating China’s national and subnational interpretation and improvisation of the strategy. I found the BRI has had more impact on transforming the Chinese state internally than in effecting change abroad; powerful local governments, companies, and think tank scholars across the country actively searched for and implemented programs and projects in the name of BRI. And most projects outside China either originated from domestic projects or have connections with domestic interest groups. To capture this whole process of the BRI, I formulated a state-mobilized globalization framework to underscore how the leadership employs the strategy to mobilize different state and market actors in the pursuit of growth and globalization. As China’s economy stabilizes, its global footprints have also expanded. The BRI therefore has significant implications for other countries, for better or worse.
From a researcher’s point of view, the BRI presented a rare opportunity to access Chinese policy actors in Beijing and practitioners in local areas in recent years. Before the BRI, U.S-China relations had deteriorated, and domestic political space had been tightened in the PRC. It was challenging to do field research in China and set up meaningful and open interviews. The BRI, interestingly, afforded the freedom to Chinese officials and scholars to share their ideas and interest in the strategy to an external scholar. In 2015-2016, as Chinese companies and governments were mobilized to implement the strategy, it was propitious to arrange interviews and tours to specific sites at the local level. Based on multi-rounds of visits to different regions and sectors, I was able to triangulate the BRI process and dynamics in China’s localities in addition to the national government.
Mark Frazier: A recent Asia Society report by Daniel Russel and Blake Berger released in September 2020 argues that China has “weaponized” the BRI by creating a “Sino-centric ecosystem of trade, technology, finance, and strategic strongpoints.” They conclude that “a deliberate military and strategic functionality seems clearly entrenched in the initiative.” This report takes the view that the BRI was much more strategically designed and implemented than what seems to be the case in your account. How do you respond to these and related claims that the BRI is a geopolitical strategy for China to enhance its power over BRI partner states and gain a strategic hold over global trade and technology infrastructures?
Min Ye: The basic premise in the Russel and Berger report, as I read it, was the dual-use idea in infrastructure projects built by China in the world. The ports, railways, power plants, communications, and digital projects, being built before and under the BRI can be used by the Chinese military and offer diplomatic leverage to Beijing. Thus, the report argues that the U.S should provide a comprehensive policy response to China’s growing influence in the region, and work actively and robustly with countries in the region (U.S. allies and non-allies) by offering alternatives and offsetting potential pressure from Beijing.
The report demonstrates intensified rivalry between China and the United States in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, and increased urgency felt by the U.S. and its allies to confront China’s influence around the world. The U.S. has done much of that before Covid, and countries in Europe and Asia have been stepping up such efforts. What the United States needs to do is to get its house in order and join the multi-country efforts in these areas more strongly.
Coming back to the BRI projects per se, the report, and many other studies, portray them as imperialist efforts to extend China’s strategic and military influence in other countries and regions. Such a perspective is very different from mine. As I explained above, the BRI emerged as the nationalist strategy because of its ability to mobilize the Chinese state and businesses to address domestic problems. Since then, neither Chinese sources nor country and case studies outside China have provided compelling evidence for military expansion as its main agenda. Rooted in post-colonial legacies, China is reluctant to “weaponize” or “militarize” activities in other countries. Besides, as China’s “grand strategy” to pursue a favorable business environment, the weaponization of BRI projects will only undermine such goals.
That being said, however, as China builds infrastructure, ports, and connectivity abroad, its influence in the recipient countries has grown. And as China’s overseas personnel and assets increase, the need for security and military forces will grow too.
Mark Frazier: You offer some brief insights in your Introduction on the challenges and limitations that you encountered in securing introductions and interviews with officials in the five cities in China where you conducted the research, including the three cities that constituted your case studies in one of the chapters: Wenzhou, Chongqing, and Ningbo. On the other hand, you gleaned a great deal of insight from carefully reading the policy documents and detailed texts of BRI-related commercial agreements, which were all publicly available. To what extent did you learn new material from the official interviews you did not already know about from documentation? (I ask this also on behalf of large numbers of scholars who now have to rely on documentary research and have little if any access to officials.)
Min Ye: Thanks for this question. When I wrote this book, the controversy on research methods and materials in China was very tense. Thus, I tried to outline how to conduct interviews and how to integrate interviews with documentary analysis. Unfortunately, interviews in China will be challenging to attain in the foreseeable future. Students of China will have to rely on documents and secondary remarks as the primary method. Here is my thinking.
First, there are many Chinese materials available online and in digital archives, due to internet technology, digital industrial policy, and the burgeoning number of researchers and reporters in China. However, the materials are a jungle, with contradictory messages pointing in different directions. It is essential for scholars to 1) be open-minded and refrain from pre-set judgments, 2) be mindful of the contexts and target audiences of the documents, and 3) use different sources and triangulation with other evidence. Furthermore, it requires scholars to have in-depth knowledge of Chinese materials to access useful sources and enough knowledge on the research subjects to reach valid conclusions based on the archives. As a community of scholars who work on China, we should offer our collective knowledge and sources to help students and other scholars compile and use Chinese documents and secondary materials more proficiently.
Second, the utility of documents varies by subject matter. For ongoing and more contemporary issues, documents are either not available or not useful. Use my book as an example. I studied three national strategies, across analyses at the national, local, and corporate levels. Documentary analysis answered some questions, but only fieldwork could have answered the others. To be specific, the Western Development Program (WDP) was in place for over a decade, with national bureaucracies heavily involved. Therefore, the official archives were exceptionally complete and reliable. It was adequate to establish state guidelines, motivations, and assessments. The China Goes Global (CGG) policy also had enough historical materials and case studies that allowed for analysis of the state policy drivers, evolution, and outcomes. However, in researching these strategies, I had to rely on interviews and local sources to fill in the information gap on subnational implementation issues. Regarding the BRI, as it is ongoing, the online materials are abundant. Still, it is hard to tell how useful the material is. Interviews with different agencies, central and local actors, help adjudicate the relative importance of the material.
Finally, field research is about research and a process of exposure and learning on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. People are social beings. Without face-to-face interactions, people across cultures tend to demonize the other side and impose the worst intentions and animosity on the other. The digital world especially is full of extreme rhetoric and misinformation. Politicians and practitioners often provide partial truths, enabling and intensifying divided extremism. Therefore, it is ever more critical to conduct field research in a politically sensitive time because distant documents tend to reinforce biases, misperceptions, and partial conclusions, enlarging the cleavage between China and the outside world.
However, travels to China will inevitably be harder, and getting access to Chinese actors will be more challenging. We will have to rely more on documentary analysis in the future. I reiterate my call for scholars to share and compile good sources for reputable information for scholarly communities and seek to explore different sources that provide a complete picture if possible. Finally, we also need to be reminded that when we conclude particular documents and wording, try to get input and opinions from people familiar with such information, and from insiders, but make sure we protect their identities.
Mark Frazier: As you know, the Indian government has rejected taking part in the BRI from the outset, stemming mainly from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project that runs through Pakistan-controlled parts of Kashmir. Would your thesis that the BRI is another in a series of state-mobilized globalization drives allay concerns of Indian policymakers about the BRI?
Min Ye: CPEC is perhaps the most geostrategic component in the BRI. It demonstrates the problem in the fusion of politics and economics and the mismatch between Chinese and foreign perspectives. First, Beijing envisions CPEC as cementing a de facto alliance relationship. Yet in reality, CPEC incorporates many infrastructures, energy, and development projects that serve Chinese commercial actors’ bottom lines too. The Gwadar Port, for example, includes a deep-water port, road connectivity, and a special economic zone that aims for industries and real estate. In the Port project alone, financiers, builders, and service providers come from diverse corporate actors in China, whose decisions to participate or not were based on commercial calculations, not the top-down strategy. Similarly, financing and construction of the Lahore Light Rail, Karakoram Highway, and Karot Hydropower Plant, among others, were also based on commercial considerations. Chinese investors in Pakistan often report that economic complementarity and business profits have driven their investment decisions there.
Politics, thus, was critical to China’s investment in Pakistan and CPEC’s significance in the BRI. The politics-economics fusion, however, also undermines CPEC. Out of respect for a political ally, Chinese agents largely deferred CPEC implementation to Pakistani officials’ preferences. Like officials elsewhere, Pakistani politicians prioritize short-term benefits and narrow power bases. When such behaviors caused political backlash, Beijing took the blame too. Besides, CPEC’s strategic rhetoric has resulted in Pakistan’s unrealistic expectations on loan conditions and repayment terms. When loan payments ran into trouble, both sides were disappointed and blamed the other side for misinformation.
However, political ties have helped stabilize CPEC through such difficulties and challenges. Since 2017, Chinese and Pakistani actors have learned to view each other in a more realistic light, and because of political relations, they are willing to adapt and adjust programs and projects suitable for new circumstances. As the BRI faces more resistance in the post-Covid world, projects in CPEC may assume more significance.
Mark Frazier: Your first book, Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (2014), examined the relative contribution of overseas Chinese and Indian communities to the nature and trajectory of domestic reforms in China and India. That book was about transnational commercial actors. Your new book seems to place China’s subnational governments and the companies that they manage as central actors in the political economy of Global China. How have Indian corporations been involved in BRI projects, and to what extent did these agreements, before tensions rose this year over the border, figure in to overall relations between China and India?
Min Ye: I generally hold a positive assessment of the BRI, but in the China-India relations, the BRI has been counterproductive and damaging. That was not the case in BRI’s early days. In 2014-2016, Chinese business and think tank scholars were active in seeking opportunities and collaborations in India. One think tank director led a group of scholars and business from Guangdong to visit Gujarat, seeking to sign some business deals on the trip. A large SOE [state owned enterprise] also had its eyes on India and formed partnerships with Indian companies through joint ventures. Indian business leaders were active in welcoming the Chinese capital and market. In this backdrop, Alibaba, Huawei, and other major Chinese tech companies announced large investment deals and proposals. If that bilateral development trend had continued, the BRI would perhaps become a new (and potentially massive) wave of regional development and economic integration in Asia.
That scenario did not happen, as Beijing promoted the BRI as “the project of the century” in 2017 and the U.S. and its allies portrayed it as a primary geostrategic threat from China. India reluctantly, but decisively, joined the U.S.-led counter-balancing and adopted restrictive measures toward Chinese investments, whether they were tied to the BRI or not. However, beyond the bilateral and geostrategic alignment, there are opportunities created by the BRI in the region. First, the AIIB [Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank], launched in connection with the BRI, has actively collaborated with the ADB [Asian Development Bank] and financed many infrastructure projects in India. Second, out of competition with China, infrastructure projects in South and Southeast Asian countries often receive counterbids from Chinese, Indian, and Japanese companies. Third, in this process, China has rolled out the Third Market Cooperation Mechanism with Japan, promoting cooperation among commercial and subnational groups in the two countries in infrastructure, industrialization, and investment in Southeast Asia and South Asia.