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CHAPTER 1
From Camels and Sails to Highways and Refineries
History is like the tide of water that always rolls forward. The peaceful development, people's well-being, openness and inclusiveness, win-win cooperation are the irresistible historical trend.
Sun Weidong, Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, November 25, 2015
In broad terms, this book considers the use of history and heritage for political ends. In that respect, it both builds on and significantly departs from a line of academic inquiry that has blossomed across a number of disciplines in recent decades. Two themes have dominated this space, nationalism and conflict. Numerous studies have been conducted into the various ways in which architecture and archaeological landscapes have been deployed in the politics of nation building. We have seen why states both build monuments and monumentalize existing structures to commemorate, fix, and impose preferred narratives of history. As Benedict Anderson lucidly demonstrated, the preservation and symbolic loading of the material past as heritage has been pivotal in creating the "imagined communities" of nation-states in the modern era. And with the language of heritage deeply entwined with notions of identity, territory, and belonging, a vast literature has addressed the different ways in which the past has been a source of contestation and violence. The notion of history wars has become familiar in accounting for the competing claims that states and other groups forcibly make over the past and its material culture. Conflicts in the Middle East and southeastern Europe have demonstrated how cultural heritage can be explicitly targeted, whereby the destruction of churches, mosques, or entire cities has been incorporated into military strategies designed to undermine the religious, cultural, or territorial bonds of populations. In March 2001 a remote valley in central Afghanistan became the focal point of global media attention, with the dynamiting of two Buddha statues carved out of the sandstone cliffs, measuring 115 and 174 feet, respectively. In smashing idols, the Taliban claimed their destruction was in accordance with Islamic law. In 2013, the Islamic State (IS) began a sustained program of heritage destruction and looting across multiple locations in Syria and Iraq. The premise for this was twofold. Economically, the smuggling of looted antiquities provided IS with a significant stream of revenue. Politically, the deliberate destruction of pre-Islamic archaeological sites, churches, and Shiite shrines and mosques was intended to eradicate difference and create a new state based on a singular narrative of history. Libraries were also targeted, with documents and books burned in a process Robert Bevan has documented as the intentional "destruction of memory." With the smashing of heritage sites in Mali by Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi in 2012, and the subsequent investigation and indictment by the International Criminal Court, we have also entered an era where such acts are recognized within international law as a war crime.
Not surprisingly, this seeming increase in the politicization of history and its cultural artifacts has been the subject of intense debate and consternation among scholars and heritage agencies around the world. Countless conferences, reports, dissertations, and scholarly publications have been dedicated to understanding the motivations for destruction and to documenting its scale. Intense debate has surrounded whether the heritage destruction by IS, publicized via a new age of global web-based broadcasting, represents something fundamentally new, or whether it merely serves as the latest manifestation of a tradition of iconoclasm and cultural erasure stretching back thousands of years. Analyses of Syria and Iraq, together with studies of the violence at Ayodhya and Preah Vihear in North India and at the Thai-Cambodian border, form part of a now well-established line of scholarly inquiry concerning the politics of heritage, one that seeks to explain why the past and its material legacies come to be contested, disputed, and, in some cases, violently fought over.
In this book I want to take a different path to this topic, not looking at instances of contestation and violence but rather considering cooperation and the role that history and heritage play therein. My contention is that this other half of the "politics of heritage" has been greatly neglected within a field of critical inquiry that has read the political in terms of enmity, hostility, violence, or hegemony and nationalism. Although the latter remain in view here, they are couched in an altogether-different reading of the political, one that seeks to unearth the complex processes and consequences that arise when history and cultural heritage are called upon to facilitate trade and diplomatic relations, open borders, build intercultural dialogue and, as we will see in the case of the Silk Roads, even help shift the geopolitical landscape of global transport and energy markets. This book is not an international relations or political science text, but it does draw on the broad understanding of these fields that international diplomacy, collaborations, alignments, and partnerships are inherently political and politicized. In so doing, it seeks to provide a more critical analysis to the complexities of culture and history in international affairs, themes that too often remain marginal or are analytically parked as "soft power." As Brook, van Walt van Praag, and Boltjes note, history is intimately connected to international relations in Asia, and yet the insights of the discipline too often remain overlooked. The focus here is not history but rather its uses, or, to be more specific, the use of a narrative — one that might be best described as an aesthetic, an evocation — for political and economic ends. Geocultural Power thus builds on Samuel Huntington's recognition that culture, religion, and history have all become integral to global politics, just not in the ways he envisaged.
My interest in this topic was triggered some twenty years ago, when conducting research on the postconflict reconstruction of Cambodia. Listed as a World Heritage Site in 1992, the temple complex of Angkor in the northwest of the country emerged as a totem for societal and cultural recovery after a generation of violence, whereby civil war and genocide arose out of the Cold War conflicts enveloping Southeast Asia from the 1950s onward. As Cambodia opened up in the 1990s, organizations from more than twenty countries offered assistance in heritage conservation and archaeology at Angkor. In what was an uplifting arena of aid, goodwill, and extraordinary generosity in spirit and resources, I became aware that this flurry of international assistance from governments, private donors, universities, and intergovernmental and nongovernmental agencies was underpinned by a highly complex, and rarely spoken about, moral and political economy. Guilt partnered trauma, asymmetry defined partnerships, and strategic interests invariably accompanied the giving and receiving of aid. Indeed, the entanglements and power relations of gifting that Marcel Mauss so eloquently identified underpinned the language of cooperation and collaboration, as well as the partnerships between organizations and between countries in the reconstruction of Cambodia. Disentangling such power dynamics, forms of appropriation, and instances of the devastation of war and extreme suffering being exploited or capitalized upon proved a sensitive and oblique line of inquiry. Nonetheless, identifying the appropriate vantage point for understanding the complex cultural politics at play in the heritage diplomacy and international cooperation of postconflict reconstruction provided a valuable platform for grappling with the Silk Roads of the twenty-first century.
The case of Cambodia, and the forms of aid it received, is indicative of how culture and heritage are now being used to maintain or build relations with others where histories and cultural pasts overlap. In Asia and the Middle East, distinct shifts have occurred in this area in the past decade or so, as Abu Dhabi, China, India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and others have emerged as significant exporters of assistance and aid in archaeology, museums, as well as in the policies and technologies that constitute modern conservation practice. Japan has long couched such cultural-sector projects in a language of peace as part of a low-key "omnidirectional" diplomacy designed to rebuild goodwill in the wake of World War II. Indeed, as the international coordinating committee for Angkor was set up in the early 1990s, Japan took the seat as one of its cochairs, along with France.
As India and China compete for economic and political influence in their region, such cultural-sector collaborations enable some very specific narratives of nation and history to be advanced. International aid is commonly underpinned by discourses of civilization, whereby both countries use a language of shared heritage to reinforce the idea that their "great cultures" stretched much farther than the boundaries of the nation-state today. Now firmly ensconced in the infrastructure planning of cities and tourism economies, as well as community based and postdisaster or postconflict reconstruction initiatives, culture and heritage have come to be deeply entangled in other forms of "hard" aid. They have also become increasingly prominent in those discourses — sustainability, development, human rights, resilience — that underpin congresses and conferences around the world today and that shape the priorities of international cooperation funding structures. In pursuing such lines of inquiry, this book focuses on a project of extraordinary scale and ambition, one that promises to transform Eurasia in profound ways over the coming years and have an impact on ideas about culture, history, and heritage as mechanisms of diplomacy and cooperation more broadly.
Belt and Road
For some time China's political scientists and economists have been engaged in a debate on the challenge of maintaining economic growth and political stability over the longer term. In 2012 Lin Yifu and Wang Jisi, two Peking University scholars, argued that an economic model based on exports and development led by domestic investment was running out of steam. They argued that China should invest the growing domestic surplus in emerging economies and use the country's export capital to develop those markets. Reeves suggests that this argument formed the genesis of a strategic proposal presented by the Chinese president Xi Jinping during a speech delivered to the government of Kazakhstan in September 2013. The speech is now widely regarded as the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A month later Xi traveled to Jakarta, delivering a second speech on regional trade and investment, this time to the Indonesian government. But as Reeves points out, in their initial form, Central Asia and Southeast Asia remained separate, subregional initiatives. By the end of 2013, however, senior members of the Chinese leadership began to view them as a single strategy, whereby the two halves found integration through an idea of historical connectivity. In the rapid evolution of Belt and Road, the development of economic ties to Central Asia and beyond constituted the "revival" of the land-based trade routes between East and West that had been established through the ancient Silk Road. In parallel, twenty-first-century engagement with Southeast Asia marked the reconstitution of the maritime trade networks of bygone centuries. China, it was proclaimed, would work with its partners to revive a Maritime Silk Road that extends down through Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa.
Yí dài yí lù, or One Belt One Road (OBOR), thus became a paradigm of trade and investment stretching across more than sixty countries and incorporating almost two-thirds of the world's population. The project was also conceived to address a number of pressing domestic agendas, namely energy security, the development of periphery areas in China's northwest, as well as the economic reforms required for this to happen, an issue that was tabled during the third plenary session of the Eighteenth Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in late 2013. Belt and Road involves building new trade zones in Xinjiang and harnessing outward investment strategies across Central Asia. Over the course of 2014, these domestic and foreign agendas were further integrated, such that the ethos and political ideologies of the national rejuvenation project, Chinese Dream, were extended into the realm of foreign relations. In 2015, Zhang Gaoli, at that time vice premier, chaired a newly formed high-level working group of five senior members of the party leadership. The composition of the team and its close ties to Xi were a clear indication of the importance and ambitious scope of the initiative. Subsequent speeches led to an expansion of the themes brought under the umbrella of Belt and Road, a situation amplified by the use of the historical transcontinental Silk Road as a metaphor for regional trade networks, cultures of diplomacy, and the harmonious relations that come from the free movement of ideas, people, technologies, and goods (fig. 1.1). The Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, as it has been subsequently renamed, thus places China at the political, economic, and cultural center of a vast geography of overland and maritime connectivity, leading analysts such as Wu Jianmin to describe it as "the most significant and far-reaching initiative that China has ever put forward."
In March 2015, the Chinese government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Commerce laid out the five-point Visions and Action Statement of connectivity and cooperation for "policy coordination," "facilities connectivity," "unimpeded trade," "financial integration," and "people-to-people bonds." The 21st Century Maritime Silk Route Economic Belt and the Silk Road Economic Road were thus conceived to build corridors of development stretching across national boundaries via networks of rail, road, airports, pipelines, container shipping ports, as well as new, strategically located cities and special economic zones. The Visions and Actions Statement also proposed transboundary collaborations across multiple sectors, spanning energy, telecommunications, education, law, medicine, transportation, and culture. The Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank (AIIB), which came into operation in early 2016 with headquarters in Beijing and an initial operating budget of $100 billion, will help finance such initiatives. Moreover, $40 billion was set aside for the Silk Road Fund, with a further $124 billion committed in May 2017 as part of the first Belt and Road summit held in Beijing. Fifty-seven countries committed their signature to the AIIB in 2015, with a further thirteen signing on two years later. In its initial conception, China held 26 percent of the bank's voting rights. Over the longer term, significant funding is also expected to come from the China Development Bank, which in 2015 declared its commitment to Belt and Road countries would be in the region of $900 billion. It is widely agreed that Beijing is looking to maintain long-term growth in the Chinese economy through international trade and capital investments. In mid-2018 Michele Ruta, of the World Bank, cited changes in global value chains since the 1990s to argue that Belt and Road represented the next phase in China's ever-growing impact on worldwide trade. He anticipated it would continue to lower impediments to trade, lead to domestic policy reforms among BRI countries, and yield significant infrastructure investment dividends.
It has also been suggested that Belt and Road advances a strategy to internally redistribute the wealth generated through urbanization by opening up the inland regions of China's northwest. The stability of Xinjiang and Tibet remains of paramount importance to the Communist Party, and transforming the cities of Urumqi and Kashgar into commerce and transport hubs represents a continuation of efforts to integrate minority groups, including Muslim Uyghur communities, with the rest of the nation. The government has long attributed instability in Xinjiang to economic factors rather than questions of political and cultural sovereignty. Attempts to address underdevelopment thus stretch back decades. Most notably, the Great Western Development Initiative, launched in 1999, focused on the economic and infrastructure development of six provinces, five autonomous regions, and the municipality of Chongqing. This included a number of urban, agriculture, and communication projects across Xinjiang in an effort to rectify regional disparities in living standards. Interestingly, as far back as 1994, Premier Li Peng proposed establishing a "New Silk Road" for such purposes, connecting China up with the Middle East. The further expansion of such policies across Xinjiang through Belt and Road are explored in chapter 4 via a discussion of Silk Road World Heritage nominations as corridors of conservation and development.
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Excerpted from "Geocultural Power"
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