Geopolitics

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Geocultural Power: China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Tim Winter

To cite this article: Tim Winter (2021) Geocultural Power: China’s Belt and Road Initiative,
Geopolitics, 26:5, 1376-1399, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1718656

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1718656

Published online: 28 Jan 2020.

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GEOPOLITICS
2021, VOL. 26, NO. 5, 1376–1399
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1718656

Geocultural Power: China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Tim Winter
School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

ABSTRACT
This paper examines China’s Belt and Road Initiative as an exercise in
geocultural power. To date, Belt and Road has been analysed as
a geopolitical and geo-economic initiative, with arguments con-
structed around the development of infrastructure, trade or finance
agreements. This paper introduces the Silk Roads as one of the most
compelling geocultural concepts of the modern era to show its
strategic value as a platform for cooperation and multi-sector connec-
tivity. A critical analysis of the Silk Roads provides new insights into Belt
and Road, revealing how China is mobilising its geocultural potential
as a civilisational state to build regional and continental connectivities.

Introduction
In the wake of Belt and Road’s 2013 launch scholars around the world have
scrambled to understand and assess its multitudinous implications. In what has
become a wave of academic publishing, certain questions and themes have already
become familiar, and an extensive debate has ensued as to whether the Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI) is ultimately a domestic or foreign policy initiative, or if
strategic corridors of development simultaneously address both (e.g., Blanchard
and Flint 2017; Brakman et al. 2019; Cai 2018; He 2018). At a more abstract level,
positions have been taken and opinions divided over whether BRI constitutes an
actual strategy, and how might we conceptualise it as an emergent architecture of
connectivity, of economic development and infrastructure, or as a platform for
international cooperation, aid and finance (Beeson 2018; Clarke 2018; Narins and
Agnew 2019). To construct their arguments scholars and analysts have found
abundant evidence in multi-billion dollar deals, and the port, road, rail and
pipeline projects that constitute transboundary connectivities (e.g., Calder 2019;
Chen et al. 2019). Such examples provide the ‘hard’ evidence of an expansionist
China and the dependencies and entanglements – financial and political – this
produces (e.g., Palit 2017; Timofeev, Lissovolik, and Filippova 2017).
In other words, and as Dellios (2017) notes, until now the Belt and Road
Initiative has been interpreted and critiqued as a geopolitical and geo-

CONTACT Tim Winter tim.winter@uwa.edu.au School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia,
Perth, Australia
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the
article.
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 GEOPOLITICS 1377

economic initiative (e.g., Rimmer 2018). This paper takes a different path by
considering Belt and Road as a geocultural project. Specifically, I argue that
through BRI China is accumulating geocultural power and that such pro-
cesses need to be seen as integral to the shifting power landscape of the
twenty-first century. Here then, building on the work of Callahan (2016a,
2016b, 2017); French (2017); Mayer (2018) and others, the article interro-
gates the Silk Road as a platform for cooperation, enabling certain ideas and
values to circulate and consolidate, which together significantly advance
China’s quest for regional primacy. In the analysis of Belt and Road, the
Silk Road is invariably acknowledged in a few short lines, casually alluded to
as a mere metaphor for connection and trade; a history spanning great
distances and centuries, wherein camel caravans crossed deserts and
Arabian dhows traversed oceans. This paper seeks to demonstrate that by
taking the Silk Road concept and the discourse of ‘revival’ more seriously,
important shifts in the social, economic and political dynamics of contem-
porary globalisation, and the ways in which these three mutually constitute
one another at the regional and national level, come into focus. To present
this argument the paper conceptualises the Silk Road as a geocultural con-
struct; a romanticised, grand narrative of pre-modern globalisation as
exchange, trade and cross-cultural encounters, one that came to be associated
with discourses of peace, international harmony and dialogue as the term
gained currency over the course of the twentieth century. The paper argues
that China mobilises these qualities and associations to advance its strategic
goals. Crucially, these qualities of a Silk Road geoculture extend and amplify
the significance of another geocultural form, Chinese civilisation. As we shall
see, the values and ideas that have come to be associated with the Silk Road
provide a unique platform for China to exercise its geocultural advantage as
a civilisational state as it seeks to accumulate power and influence by building
connectivities and entanglements across multiple sectors.

A Geocultural Silk Road

Understanding the role culture and history play in international affairs and
politics seems a perennially difficult question to answer. For a multitude of
reasons, and as Ang, Yudhishthir, and Mar (2015) note, we seem much better
at interpreting the ways in which memory, history, identity and cultural
power politically function and help constitute the political at the national
level (e.g., Gellner 2006; Gladney 2004; Harrison 2013). Culture and the state
seem to be inexorably tied; a dyad around which concepts and arguments
about citizenship, religion, homeland, ethnicity and such like have been
derived. Countless studies have also revealed how nationalism draws on the
past to both produce and deny politically forceful identities (e.g., Bose 2017;
Kohl 1993; Meskell 1998; Ricca 2007).
1378 T. WINTER

There are of course notable bodies of work that grapple with culture in
international politics: how it comes to be mobilised and contrived for
particular ends; how it operates as a regime of social governance; and how
it becomes a site of contestation and violence (Kivimaki 2014; Nye 2013;
Peng and Keane 2019; Scott 2016). Ideas of soft power typically retain the
national as the architecture of analysis, but emphasise non-state actors.
Postcolonial theory, which has sought to disentangle empire from imperial-
ism and understand the residual effects of European expansionism, has been
overlaid by debates about regionalism and civilisations – framed as either
clashing or in dialogue – in the attempt to understand the cultural dimen-
sions of international affairs (e.g., Bettiza 2014; Milner 2017). Nonetheless,
once we move outside the frame of the national, the conceptual coherence
required for relating the cultural to the political seems much less assured,
particularly as analytical complexities begin to multiply. This paper seeks to
contribute to this space. It does so by critically examining some key trends in
cultural sector cooperation and diplomacy that have gathered momentum
since China launched its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. In that regard it
builds on the analyses of Shambaugh (2013), French (2017) and others who
seek to locate China’s expansionist ambitions within their deeper historical
contexts.
While the nation-state has become the most entrenched geocultural ima-
ginary of the modern era, the Great Game, Asia, Cold War and the Silk Road
itself are among those geocultural categories that give form to larger, more
amorphous entities. As Hannerz (2009, 268) suggests, they help us ‘think
geoculturally, about the world and its parts, and the main features of those
parts’. Through a discussion of geocultural scenarios Hannerz (2009, 268)
argues culture comes to be imagined at multiple scales and by inserting the
‘geo’ we can critically interpret the different map-making processes, which
seek to make sense of ‘the distribution of things cultural, somehow cultural,
over territories and their human populations.’ In this vein, in 1991 Immanuel
Wallerstein made the case for seeing the geocultural as akin to the geopoli-
tical in an effort to explain core-periphery shifts in the modern world system
that transcended the economic and political. More recently, Christopher
Kalter (2017) has explored how the idea of the ‘Third World’ circulated
and evolved from its origins in France and the Algerian War. He notes
that in the 1960s the term ‘reframed and encouraged communication and
cooperation between people who fought for change in different parts of the
globe’ and thus became a ‘mobilization myth’ for those with political aspira-
tions in Asia and Africa at a time of decolonisation (Berger 2004, 36 as
quoted in Kalter 2017, 116). Over time the term also became an idiom that
informed the global geographies of development and its study. To talk of the
Third World then as a geocultural concept points to how imaginaries emerge
and alter, and how they are constructed and reconstructed through certain
 GEOPOLITICS 1379

shared ideas, values or ideologies. Such terms thus help give coherence to
expansive geographies, and enable relations and frontiers to not just be
imagined but also constructed as realities. Medhurst et al. (1997) demon-
strated this in relation to the Cold War through the circulation of metapho-
rical clusters. Likewise, Isaac Kamola (2019) has considered how the global
came to be imagined within the American academy in this period.
Decolonisation provided the context for framing, even containing, complex
ethnic, religious and cultural histories within the nation-state, a process that
retained some of the core epistemologies constructed under conditions of
colonialism, and, as Kamola shows, this came to be overlaid with imaginaries
and conceptualisations of the world as global. It is through this analytical lens
that we need to view the Silk Road, and its significance as a platform for
international cooperation today.
Known around the world, the Silk Road has become one of the most
compelling geocultural concepts of the modern era. In simplest terms, the
Silk Road is a form of historiography that foregrounds connectivity and
transmission, and as such has formed part of the project to write world
history. There is, however, considerable debate over its validity as an analy-
tical device for understanding pre-modern Eurasia. Centred around an ima-
gery of camel caravans and traders crossing desert and mountain, the term
foregrounds neoliberal depictions of trade and technological exchange, and
relies on romanticised ideas about the flow of ideas, population movements
and the rising and falling of regional powers. For authors such as Hansen
(2016, 2017), Foltz (2010) and others, the Silk Road remains a helpful
architecture for tracing different forms of cultural and religious connectivity,
and sheds light on the complex and poorly understood trade networks that
defined the earliest phases of globalisation. Accordingly, it is a framework
through which we can better understand the ways in which ideas, technol-
ogies, religions, languages and a vast array of cultural products migrated
among populations and regions. The critique of the Silk Road narrative,
however, centres around the way it reduces complex histories spanning
millennia and vast regions into a singular, all-encompassing theme, one
that too easily elides and pacifies the inconvenient: conflict, famine, plague,
imperial conquest, religious war and piracy.
The term was first coined by the German geologist Ferdinand von
Richthofen in 1877 as part of an account of his time spent in northwest
China surveying routes for a possible transcontinental train line that would
carry coal to a rapidly industrialising Germany (Chin 2013; Waugh 2007).
A geographer in the broadest sense, Richthofen was interested in the trade
routes between Han dynasty China (206BCE-220CE) and the Roman Empire,
with his description of a Seidenstraße focused primarily on the trade routes
surrounding the Taklamakan Desert, in what is today northwest China (for
a detailed account of Richthofen’s construction of the Silk Road see Chin
1380 T. WINTER

2013; Waugh 2007). In effect, Richthofen’s account captured a tiny fragment

of a much larger history of regional trade and exchange. In the run up to
World War I other scholars and explorers added further detail by gathering
manuscripts, artefacts and artworks from across Central Asia. A remote
outpost in the geographies of European empire, the region provided
researchers from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and Sweden unique
insights into some of the multivalent, multi-directional flows and networks of
a pre-modern world system stretching across the Eurasian landmass. The
Great War, together with the ideological shifts towards history created by
revolutions in Russia and the creation of the Soviet Union, would however
curtail such lines of scholarship.
In the 1930s the Silk Road began to enter the popular imagination in the West,
particularly in Europe. The new communication technologies of radio and silent
film, together with newspapers, autobiographies and magazines such as National
Geographic brought stories of grand adventure to ever greater audiences in
Europe and North America (see Winter 2019). Sven Hedin’s trip to Xinjiang
in the early 1930s and his subsequent book The Silk Road was widely read across
Europe, and added to the allure of the region (Hedin 1938). Around this time
Marco Polo was also becoming a figure of popular culture, in large part through
a Hollywood film industry fascinated by both grand adventure and the Orient.
A brief but golden moment of twentieth-century transcontinental adventure –
during which motor vehicle expeditions sponsored by André Citroën, Buick, or
Esso crossed Asia – romantically depicted trips as ‘retracing’ the steps of the
thirteenth century traveller and his ‘route along the Silk Road’ (see for example,
Thaw and Thaw 1940). Of note here then is how ideas of exchange, dialogue,
openness, and cross-border trade as a source of cultural and economic enrich-
ment became pivotal to the Silk Road story once it began to take hold in the
public imagination as an enigmatic, alluring account of Eurasian history. And
crucially, from the 1950s onwards such themes would form part of the archi-
tecture of international cooperation and diplomacy, and the discourses of peace
that continued to gather momentum through to the end of the Cold War.

Silk Road Diplomacy

In post-World War II Japan, the Silk Road emerged as a valuable concept for
rebuilding relations with Asian neighbours and Europe. A 1957 report by
Japanese scholars on the ‘history of Eastern and Western cultural contacts’
written for UNESCO identified the ways in which Japanese civilisation – its
language, art and Buddhist traditions – both benefitted from and contributed
to other cultures and societies through centuries of exchange and peaceful
dialogue (Japanese National Commission for UNESCO 1957). The report
critiqued Richthofen’s notion of the Silk Road as too narrowly focused on the
East West connectivities emanating from Han dynasty China, and argued
 GEOPOLITICS 1381

that a far more expansive history of connectivity was required. To that end,
the report was structured around three core routes – Steppe, Oasis, and Sea –
using the work of Japanese scholars from the pre-war period. As I explain at
greater length elsewhere, this document provided the template for a decade-
long multilateral initiative led by UNESCO called Silk Roads: Roads of
Dialogue at the end of the Cold War (Winter 2019). Between 1988–1997
dozens of conferences, exhibitions, media stories, and publications celebrated
histories of cross-cultural and intra-regional dialogue (Elisseeff 2000).
A narrative of harmonious trade, and civilisational and religious dialogue
between East and West was highly expedient for a UN agency aiming to
reduce hostilities and foster peace at a time of major geopolitical upheaval.
Citing James Millward, Candela (2013) also notes that the participation of
Chinese scholars and bureaucrats on desert expeditions, together with the
hosting of events in Guangzhou and Quanzhou, also enabled China to
embrace a model of globalisation, openness and civilisational dialogue that
suited the domestic politics of the time. Celebrated histories of Buddhism,
the Han and Tang dynasties, and silk trade effectively eclipsed the Islamic
histories of the country’s northwest.
Against the backdrop of the First Gulf War, in 1991 the Sultan of Oman
loaned UNESCO the Fulk al-Salamah (Ship of Peace) troop carrier for an
expedition along the newly named Maritime Silk Road. On board, scholars
informed a team of international journalists about histories of trade and
peaceful exchange across the Indian Ocean, including those voyages led by
Zheng He in the fifteenth century. As the Fulk al-Salamah reached East Asia,
it stopped in South Korea to commemorate the legacies of the ‘Unified Silla
Kingdom’; a symbolic story of unity for a Korean peninsula that remained
separated by heavily guarded fences.
UNESCO’s strategic adoption of the Silk Road to promote peace and
harmonious relations came on the back of the concept’s extensive use in
Japan in the decades following the 1957 report. In 1964 the Olympic flame
travelled between Athens and Tokyo, via ‘an international relay along the
southern Silk Road’ (Majumdar and Mehta 2013, 171). Since 1936, the
carrying of the flame across borders in the weeks preceding each Games
had been a symbolic ritual of ‘peaceful inter-cultural communication and
exchange’ (Majumdar and Mehta 2013, 179). With the Tokyo Olympics
being the first games to be held in Asia, organisers infused this symbolism
with additional motifs. The runner chosen to light the cauldron, Sakai
Yoshinori, was born on the day of the Hiroshima bombing and global
television coverage of this nineteen-year-old athlete striding round the sta-
dium to great cheers suitably emblematised a country ‘successful’ in its
peaceful reconstruction. During this period, Daisaku Ikeda also used the
Silk Road motif as part of a diplomacy and educational programme that
involved the founding of numerous associations, schools and research
1382 T. WINTER

institutes ostensibly dedicated to the promotion of peace through Buddhism

(Min-On Concert Association, 2011). One project of particular importance
during this period was the collaboration between state broadcasters NHK and
CCTV to produce a twelve-part television documentary series. Filmed in
northwest China in the mid 1970s, and broadcast around the world to great
acclaim, The Silk Road was first proposed as a project to revive Sino-Japanese
relations during Prime Minister Tanaka’s trip to Peking, which took place
several months after Nixon’s landmark meeting with Mao in 1972.
Significantly here, The Silk Road series depicted civilisational entanglement,
between China and Japan, and between East Asia and South Asia, for
diplomatic purposes.
In 1988, the same year as UNESCO launched its Roads in Dialogue project,
the Japanese city of Nara hosted the six month long Grand Exhibition of Silk
Road Civilizations. Organisers revisited the three-route model developed in
1957, with the two land routes combined into The Oasis and Steppe Routes,
and two additional exhibitions dedicated to The Route of Buddhist Art and The
Sea Route. International collaborations were established for each, with a number
of countries loaning artefacts for display. Government ministries from France,
Iraq, Italy and the Soviet Union sent items for The Oasis and Steppe Routes. For
The Route of Buddhist Art items were procured via agreements with India,
China, Korea and Pakistan. Maritime archaeology collaborations between
Tokyo’s Ancient Orient Museum and the Syrian Ministry of Culture meant
the story of The Sea Route across the Indian Ocean was told through items
recovered from the seabed off the coast of Syria and national museums in
Aleppo and Damascus (The Silk Road Exposition 1988).
Global interest in the Silk Road dramatically picked up at the end of the
Cold War, in large part due to the opening of Central Asia for international
tourism. In the hands of Western travel writers and historians, it continued
to be depicted around a series of tropes and iconic images; a story of exotic
cultures and the romance of grand adventure across open deserts in search of
ancient civilisations (see for example, Stevens 1988; Whitfield 2015;
Cammarata 1998). In China, India and Japan, the Silk Road increasingly
entered the public imagination as a history of intra-regional connection,
rather than the narrative of East-West more familiar to the West, with figures
such as Faxian and Xuanzang becoming narrative vehicles for popularising
the history of Buddhism’s spread across the region.
The geopolitical shifts of this period also meant the term emerged as
a platform for foreign policy. The former soviet republics of Central Asia
invoked the language of Silk Road ‘crossroads’ to signal their new-found strate-
gic location in uncertain times (Laruelle 2015). China, Japan, South Korea and
United States were among those who embraced this discursive turn in diplo-
macy, each conjuring up foreign policy strategies for the region through varia-
tions of a ‘new’ or ‘iron’ Silk Road. As Clarke (2011) explains at length, for much
 GEOPOLITICS 1383

of the Cold War, Beijing governed the northwest province of Xinjiang as a buffer
zone, preventing Soviet communism spreading eastwards. China’s increasing
need for oil and gas in the 1990s demanded a new strategy. In 1994 Li Peng, then
Chinese Premier, proposed a ‘New Silk Road’ that would connect Xinjiang and
its neighbouring regions with the new republics of Central Asia, and onwards to
the Middle East. Years later this strategy evolved into the Great Western
Development Initiative, which supported the economic and infrastructure
development of six provinces, five autonomous regions and the municipality
of Chongqing. Around this time, Japan also embarked upon its Silkroad
Diplomacy initiative, a strategy that would evolve to stretch across to Russia.
In justifying the government’s engagement with Central Asia, Prime Minister
Ryutaro Hashimoto stated ‘Japan has deep-rooted nostalgia for this region
stemming from the glory of the days of the Silk Road’ (Hashimoto as quoted
in Dadabaev 2018a). In 1998 The Silk Road Energy Mission was launched,
followed by the Arc of Freedom and Prosperity Initiative in 2006 (Len 2008).
In the United States, Congress introduced the Silk Road Strategy Act in 1997,
with the aim of strengthening democracy and fostering economic development
through enterprise and infrastructure projects in the South Caucasus and
Central Asia (GovTrack 2018). Despite repeated attempts, the bill never passed.
Laruelle (2015) explains that by 2003 a number of Washington think tanks once
again emphasised the importance of non-military interventions in these regions,
and in 2011 Hillary Clinton used one such report by S. Frederick Starr (2007) as
a template for a New Silk Road Initiative. Three years later, the South Korean
government launched its own Iron Silk Road Project; an ambitious transconti-
nental rail initiative designed to connect northern Europe with East Asia. In
contrast to Tokyo, Seoul’s Silk Road project included Mongolia and targeted
strengthening economic ties with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, two countries
with a sizable Korean diaspora dating back to Soviet times (Dadabaev 2018b).
The idea of a new Silk Road for the modern era, envisaged around pipelines,
transcontinental road and rail, energy production and cross-border trade had
thus well and truly arrived. By juxtaposing such policies with post-Soviet
Russian Eurasianism, Laruelle (2015) argues the Silk Roads emerged in this
period as ‘specific constellation(s) of worldview perceptions and political cul-
ture’, and thus need to be taken seriously by theorists of critical geopolitics.
The scale and scope of China’s Belt and Road Initiative sustains and
amplifies this co-opting of the Silk Roads. In a continuation of these Silk
Road policies cited above, Belt and Road takes the themes of cross-border
infrastructure and trade connectivities as the means to prosperity, but advances
them in notable ways. The Maritime Silk Road expands on land-based routes
to include the oceans and seas that link East Asia to the Mediterranean.
Beijing’s vision of overland connectivity also moves out from previous
Central Asia incarnations, southwards through Southeast Asia and west across
to Southern Europe. But far more than a question of geography, Belt and Road
1384 T. WINTER

co-opts the themes and associations that lie at the heart of a modern Silk Road
geocultural imaginary to insert some key strategic concepts into the discourse
and practice of international cooperation.
To briefly summarise then, I have sought to demonstrate that as the Silk
Road emerged in the twentieth century as a geocultural imaginary of pre-
modern globalisation it took on particular qualities and characteristics. We
have seen that as a narrative of history, it has been primarily constructed
around trade, open-borders, cosmopolitanism and inter-cultural dialogue; all
of which are depicted as benign foundations for both societal and economic
enrichment. But as the Silk Road has been picked up by the UN, non-
governmental organisations, media companies, and museum and exhibition
curators since the 1950s, these themes have also come to be imbued with ideas
about peace, harmony, mutual-respect, cooperation and such like. Crucially, it
is these qualities that we now see being mobilised in Belt and Road and co-
opted by both China and its BRI partner countries for strategic advantage.

Geocultural Power
Since 2013 senior members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and
diplomats have consistently cited the Silk Roads – the values being renewed,
the age-old histories of trade being revived – to frame speeches and agreements.
Through Belt and Road cooperation, Beijing proclaims, the ‘Silk Road spirit’
comes alive, such that a series of relationships built on ‘trust’, ‘harmony’, ‘open-
ness’ and ‘dialogue’ are being revived for the twenty-first century (Winter 2019).
At the first Belt and Road Forum in 2017 Xi Jinping stated the Silk Road was the
‘great heritage of human civilization’, a legacy of ‘peace and cooperation, open-
ness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit’ (Xi Jinping 2017).
Such themes underpinned the international conference on the Dialogue of
Civilizations held two years later in Beijing.
The Silk Road also provides the ceremonial entertainment of Belt and
Road gatherings and meetings, and camel caravans crossing deserts or smil-
ing faces engaged in traditional crafts now provide the content for countless
promotional videos and graphics. Such developments suggest the Silk Road is
merely an aesthetic; a benign evocative of pre-modern pasts that have little to
do with the connective infrastructure realities being assembled today, and
thus not worthy of serious attention. But what has been missed in the
analysis of Belt and Road is the wave of cultural sector projects and interna-
tional collaborations that emerged in the wake of Xi Jinping’s visits to Nur-
Sultan (then Astana) and Jakarta in 2013. Across Asia, East Africa and
Southern Europe millions of dollars have poured into Silk Road museum
projects, film and cultural festivals, world heritage sites, urban conservation,
tourism branding, and intergovernmental forums.1 In Southeast Asia, the
Maritime Silk Road has become a recurring theme for public and private
 GEOPOLITICS 1385

museums, art shows, travelling exhibitions, heritage cities, and cruise-ship

companies to depict histories of trade and exchange between cultures.
Television documentaries, newspapers and online bloggers now regularly
cite the seven voyages of Zheng He from the first half of the fifteenth century
as a Silk Road ‘spirit’ that China is ‘reviving’ today through win-win coop-
eration and peaceful trade. In 2019 the World Tourism Organization pub-
lished its strategy for promoting Maritime Silk Road tourism; a grand arc of
maritime history and heritage that offers a unique opportunity for port cities
located as far apart as East Asia and the Mediterranean to capture the fast-
growing Asian tourism market, including the 140 million or so outbound
Chinese tourism trips now made each year (UNWTO 2019).
In 2014 the Silk Road International Cultural Forum came into being, with
an initial Astana gathering followed by a second meeting in Moscow a year
later. The Xi’an based Silk Road International Arts Festival also expanded its
ambitions rapidly, with annual events featuring calligraphy, painting and
photography exhibitions, as well as performances by artists from more than
eighty countries. Silk Road film, music and art festivals have been inaugu-
rated, and in 2016 the Silk Road International League of Theatres launched as
a collaboration between sixty-six theatres located across twenty-one coun-
tries. The same year, more than three hundred delegates from Europe and
Asia attended the Development Cooperation Forum on International
Industrial Parks and Silk Road International Culture Week in Xi’an. Since
the launch of Belt and Road, Dunhuang has hosted a number of expos and
forums, with thousands of delegates attending from more than seventy
countries. We have also seen a distinct upturn in archaeological collabora-
tions between China and Belt and Road partner countries. As I explain in
detail elsewhere, government ministries and universities in Kenya, Greece,
Egypt, Malaysia and Sri Lanka are among these that have embarked on joint
expeditions in search of the evidence of connected pasts (Winter 2019).
The Silk Road concept thus locates China’s economic and political ambi-
tions within a particular historical narrative, one based around cultural
diffusion, encounter and exchange. It is a story of transport and the trading
of items carried over great distances. Histories of mobility, cultural exchange
and the cross-fertilisation of ideas have thus become key resources for those
involved in promoting narratives of connectivity today. In addition to serving
as a productive platform for building international partnerships, the Silk
Roads also act as a lens through which the scale and depth of China’s cultural
past comes into focus and is magnified. In recent years China has established
a number of research and policy institutes dedicated to the preservation of
culture. In 2019 Xi Jinping also signalled his desire for Belt and Road
partners to engage in cooperation projects across this sector.2 Within
China significant resources are now being dedicated to the project of build-
ing a great power history, such that present society is ‘connected’ to carefully
1386 T. WINTER

cultivated pasts via museums, festivals, expos, symbolically significant build-

ings and landscapes, as well as an array of traditional cultural practices (Lu
2014; Shepard 2009; Wang Shu-Yi 2008). Almost forty cultural sites – urban,
monumental and archaeological – have already been recognised by UNESCO
as being of Outstanding Universal Value and thus worthy of its prestigious
World Heritage List. Now in its fifth decade, the list has become a marker of
not just national, but civilisational standing. Governments around the world
have pursued world heritage to advance particular forms of cultural nation-
alism domestically. At the international level, the list has emerged as the
cultural Olympics of history, with much energy going into ensuring the
worlds of European, Persian, Arab, Indian or Chinese pasts are given the
recognition they deserve. Today China vies with Italy to be at the top of the
global league table of cultural sites. After many years of preparation, stretch-
ing back to the early 2000s, 2014 saw the first Silk Road themed world
heritage listing; a joint nomination between China, Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan, titled ‘The Routes Network of Chang’an-Tian-shan Corridor’
(UNESCO and Republic of Korea Funds-in-Trust-Project 2016). The dossier
contained thirty-three separate sites, twenty-two of which are in China, with
eight in Kazakhstan and the remaining three located in Kyrgyzstan. Further
collaborative nominations are in the pipeline, all of which are being coordi-
nated by a committee comprised of fourteen member states from across the
region.

The Asymmetry of Civilisations

Many further examples could be cited. But in beginning to consider the
implications of this the first point to note is how Belt and Road has created
a political economy for a whole new way of imagining, displaying and writing
the cultures and histories of Eurasia. In fundamentally altering the political
impetus for cultural sector cooperation, particularly in Asia, it has given new
life to discourses of civilisation and inter-civilisational dialogue. Since the
launch of Belt and Road, the CCP has increasingly proclaimed that China is
a civilisational state that holds qualities and values for global security and
stability. Today China invokes civilisation as a resource for peace, respect and
harmony. Such developments can be seen in relation to tianxia, or ‘all under
heaven’, an ancient Chinese concept built around a hierarchical worldview of
lands, people and cultures. Tianxia links ideas about civilisation to trade with
vassal states and the doctrine of just rule. The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ implicitly
inferred rule over the entire known world. Wang (2017a), Yan (2011), and
French (2017) are among those that have considered the enduring signifi-
cance of tianxia in relation to China’s international ambitions today. Wang
(2017b) for example argues that by drawing on such ideas a politics of
cosmopolitanism comes into view, one where ‘long-distance learning and
 GEOPOLITICS 1387

exchange’ guide cross-cultural learning and reciprocity as both a civic

responsibility and principle for engaging with others. The themes addressed
here indicate how Silk Road imaginaries significantly advance such ideas
about tianxia as a sphere of culture and value. In May 2019, for example,
China hosted the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations, inviting
delegates from forty-seven countries. During his opening address to the
conference Xi Jinping drew on ideas about cross-cultural learning and deep
histories of ‘harmony’ and ‘neighbourliness’ within Chinese civilisation to
project Belt and Road futures of cooperation, stating:

Through interactions on this continent, Asian civilizations have enriched each

other, and written an epic of development. Our forefathers in Asia have long
engaged in inter-civilizational exchanges and mutual learning. The ancient trade
routes, most notably the Silk Road, the Tea Road and the Spice Road, brought silk,
tea, porcelain, spices, painting and sculpture to all corners of Asia, and they have
witnessed inter-civilizational dialogue in the form of trade and cultural interflow.
Today, the Belt and Road initiative, together with the two corridors and one belt,
the Eurasian Economic Union and other initiatives have greatly expanded inter-
civilizational exchanges and mutual learning. Cooperation among nations between
science, education, technology, culture, health, and people-to-people exchanges are
thriving like never before … .For Chinese civilization harmony and good neigh-
borliness is the principal guiding our interactions with other countries, and to
deliver prosperity and security to the people is the overarching goal. To keep pace
with the times through reform and innovation, is the abiding commitment, and to
achieve harmony between man and nature, the underlying philosophy. China
today is more than the country itself. It is very much a part of Asia and the
world. In a time to come, China will open its arms wider to embrace the world and
contribute the dynamic achievements of Chinese civilizations to a better world in
the future. (Xi Jinping 2019)

With Beijing driving the Belt and Road structures and financing of interna-
tional cooperation, the cultural and scientific contributions of China’s past
are, not surprisingly, given the greatest attention, effectively ensuring that
Chinese civilisation serves as a cultural, even cosmological, gravity around
which the economic and security interests of smaller nations can orbit in the
twenty-first century. Here then Callahan’s (2009) observations concerning
the tensions and ambiguities between power and culture in tianxia are
pertinent. The set of relations, ideas and norms now being advanced through
Belt and Road constitute a complex matrix of power and thus raise questions
about whether the Silk Road discourse also implicitly carries, and sanctions,
a ‘revival’ of hegemonic ambitions (see also Callahan 2016b, 2017). As
Callahan (2016a, 3) notes, various commentators and academics in China
view the Silk Road as offering an alternative model of globalisation, one that
is built on very different norms and values to those of ‘Western imperialism’
(see also Buzan 2010).
1388 T. WINTER

As the concept of the civilisational state has been taken up within political
theory, debate has often centred on the degree to which those nation-states
that inherit deep histories exhibit particular world-views and ideas about
state-craft. Here then we can return to Immanuel Wallerstein’s alignment of
the geocultural with the geopolitical. Informed by a Braudelian reading of
history, Wallerstein (1991) ties the geocultural into the geopolitical to inter-
pret broad changes in international affairs at the regional scale over the
longue durée.3 In other words, the geocultural is seen as akin to the geopo-
litical. Clearly, grounding the strategic ambitions of Belt and Road in the
‘ancient’ Silk Roads signals a magnitude of scale in both time and space. The
significance of the cultural past to China’s political order has become more
evident under Xi Jinping. At the heart of his use of the ‘China Dream’
discourse lies the notion of rejuvenation and renewal. Babones (2017) is
among those to have argued Belt and Road contributes to this, being ‘expli-
citly designed to put China back at the economic and political centre of the
continent’. What his analysis of the ‘China Dream’ as a revival of the Middle
Kingdom misses however is the way in which it also seeks to restore China’s
place at the centre of history, whereby a pride for the achievements of the
past four decades is geographically and culturally grounded in five thousand
years of history.4 It is a theme Zhang Wei-Wei (2012, loc., 135) takes up to
interpret China’s ‘rise’ as a civilisational state:
It does not easily imitate or follow other models, be they Western or otherwise. It
has its own intrinsic logic of evolution and development. It is bound to encounter
all kinds of challenges in the future, but its rise is seemingly unstoppable and
irreversible. The civilizational state has a strong capability to draw on the strengths
of other nations while maintaining its own identity. As an endogenous civilization
capable of generating its own standards and values, it makes unique contributions
to the world civilizations. A civilizational state can exist and evolve independently
of the endorsement or acknowledgment from others.

Collins (2001) has conceptualised civilisations in terms of the gravitational pull

they exert through ‘zones of prestige’, which radiate outward through unevenly
formed networks and channels. The values and ideas of a civilisation are thus
carried by agents of transmission who move back and forth between centres of
creativity and activity. Events, together with physical objects, artworks, arte-
facts and so forth, communicate the vitality of a civilisation and those
moments where it might be rising or fading. The significance of Collins’
analysis is twofold. First, he demonstrates how economic and political struc-
tures appear on the back of such contact and the inequalities of power within
the contact process. This holds important implications for how we think about
the different elements of BRI, and their relative weight. Second, he reminds us
civilisations are not to be defined by simply colouring regions on a map.
A narrative of Silk Road routes creates the corridors of transmission, and in
an era of Belt and Road these are both physical and virtual. Its economic
 GEOPOLITICS 1389

development corridors are zones of connectivity across which we are seeing

a convergence between cultural and other sectors of collaboration. The heritage
diplomacy of the Silk Roads has found its greatest vitality in those countries
and contexts where infrastructure and logistics ambitions are to be found.
Greece, Kenya and Sri Lanka are among those countries where Chinese
funding of museum and archaeology collaborations has accelerated against
a backdrop of major BRI infrastructure projects (Winter 2019).
But these channels of transmission are not just physical. At a symbolic
level, internationally renowned museums, the World Tourism Organization
(UNWTO) and National Geographic television are among the other routes
through which the themes and associations of the ‘ancient’ Silk Roads, and
thus Chinese civilisation, now flow; enabling narratives of peaceful inter-
polity relations, on both land and sea – to acquire prestige and legitimacy.
UNESCO bestows considerable prestige upon cultural sector cooperation
among Belt and Road partners, and the convergence of two globally recog-
nisable brands – World Heritage and the Silk Road – enable China to
accumulate geocultural power in ways that state led initiatives, such as
Confucius Institutes, cannot.

Geocultural Citizenries
Seen together then, the maritime and overland Silk Roads enable China to
insert itself at the centre – culturally, physically and strategically – of a story
of regional and continental connectivity. The cultural dimensions of Belt and
Road raise a multitude of important questions regarding the governance of
ethnic and minority groups, and the increasingly charged cultural politics of
Tibet, Xinjiang and other border regions (Winter 2019). The impact of Belt
and Road on domestic cultural politics for China and other Belt and Road
partner countries, notably Turkey, Iran, Myanmar and Sri Lanka to cite a few
examples, will require sustained, critical attention over the coming years and
is beyond the scope of this paper. In the limited space here, I wish to
highlight how the Silk Road concept plays a much larger role in China in
the domestic legitimisation of Belt and Road as a state project. By giving
explicit recognition to those eras and dynasties when the country was open to
the outside world for trade and exchange it fashions certain slices of Chinese
history into a geocultural resource. As China nationalises the Silk Road
today, Buddhism, accounts of silk trade and sea-faring, together with his-
tories of Ming, Han and Tang dynasties, eclipse the country’s more complex
socio-cultural heritage of Islam, for example. In a country where the past
bears heavily on contemporary events, this constitutes a strategy for orienting
a contemporary citizenry towards a vision of a society that is confident in
engaging with the world, and that is enriched by exchange and through the
trading of ideas, technologies and goods. Put another way, the Silk Roads
1390 T. WINTER

help project the country forward through the idea that it benefits from the
integration of outside influences while simultaneously retaining a strong
sense of integrity and distinctiveness. This approach has gained currency
among those who see China as a civilisational state that is resilient to the
detrimental forces of globalisation through values and qualities, which, at the
same time, enable it to contribute to the global challenges of today. The
addition of the Maritime Silk Road folds in the sea to such processes.
From the 1990s onwards, Zheng He’s voyages have been appropriated
within China’s diplomatic discourse as evidence of a long history of peaceful
maritime relations. By erasing conflict and the violent dimensions of his seven
voyages across the Indian Ocean during the first half of the fifteenth century
Zheng He is now commemorated through museums, statues and historical
landscapes such as his Nanjing shipyards. In recent years Beijing has stepped
up the project of nurturing a maritime identity, with numerous exhibitions
and media projects, monuments, carefully preserved shipwrecks and cultural
landscapes all testifying to China’s engagement with the sea and the cultural
interactions brought about by those who navigated open waters. The city of
Guangzhou is now leading an initiative involving more than twenty cities to
promote the culture and history of the ‘Maritime Silk Road’.5 What we are
witnessing then is the crafting of an identity that flows through popular culture
and public space, and a departure from previous associations of the sea with
humiliation. To put this in context, Andrew Lambert (2018) makes the
distinction between seapower states and those that merely deploy human,
physical and technological resources to build navies. But only a select few –
Greece, Carthage, Venice, Britain and Dutch Republic – have consciously
constructed seapower culture and identities to secure economic and strategic
advantage. Belt and Road powerfully demonstrates how China operates as
a continental power, increasing its footprint across the Eurasian landmass.
But in the conjoining of the Maritime Silk Roads, old and new, I would suggest
we also see the increasing geostrategic significance given to maritime identities
and an attempt to nurture some of the qualities of a seapower.
The Chinese tourist plays a critical role in all this. Over the past two decades
Asia has witnessed a dramatic increase in domestic and intra-regional leisure
travel. In a parallel to the experiences of Europe and North America in
the second half of the twentieth century, tourism has emerged as one of the
defining markers of middle-class identities across the region, meaning that
history and culture have been transformed and reframed for new modes of
consumption. In China the state has looked to steer such processes and create
citizens that are both proud of China’s ‘glorious’ past and, at the same time
increasingly ‘worldly’. The Silk Roads contribute to this agenda in distinct ways.
Since 2013 an industry of Silk Road television documentaries has emerged, and
travel agents market multi-country trips as Silk Road itineraries. As Chinese
tourists venture out in ever greater numbers, they visit museums and historical
 GEOPOLITICS 1391

landmarks in Sri Lanka, Singapore, Italy, Tanzania and elsewhere, through

which they learn about the global reach of Chinese civilisation, trade and culture.
The significance of this, I would suggest, lies in part in its role in the project of
legitimising the state project to a population of 1.4 billion. The grand ambitions
of Belt and Road carry significant risk for the CCP and for Xi Jinping himself,
and Silk Road narratives powerfully communicate the idea that China is at its
strongest, most vibrant when it is ‘open’ and in dialogue with the outside world,
as noted earlier.6
But here we also need to consider the growing economic power Chinese
tourism holds across the geographies of Belt and Road. The number of
outbound trips now exceeds 140 million per year. With a significant propor-
tion of Chinese holidaying outside the PRC for the first time, over 40 percent
of these trips are made to Hong Kong and Macau (BSEC 2019). Nonetheless,
cities around the world are already feeling the impact of large waves of
Chinese tourism. It is a sector that holds vast potential for growth. Today,
only 13 percent of Chinese citizens hold a passport, a figure expected to
double by 2030 (BSEC 2019). Silk Road tourism thus gives impetus to Belt
and Road infrastructure projects. Hotel zones, air and cruise-ship ports,
along with a host of transport infrastructure initiatives are all envisaged
around projected tourism increases. To cite just one example, the
Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), which brings
together twelve countries in the Black Sea region, has developed a Silk Road
tourism programme with the support of the UNWTO. Long-term plans
include the development of ports and coastal destinations, as well as themed
cultural routes that facilitate multi-country itineraries. Overlaying this is the
UNWTO’s Western Silk Road Tourism Development initiative, launched in
2016 (UNWTO 2017). Efforts to brand and market the Western Silk Road as
a concept that links the economies of the Mediterranean, Caspian and Black
Sea regions has been supported by a series of university-based research
projects, notably the European Interdisciplinary Silk Road Tourism Centre
at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Tourism forms part of China’s ambitions for a Digital Silk Road, launched at
the Global Internet Conference, in Wuzhen in 2017. Through their coupling of
hardware infrastructure with digital platforms, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei,
Xiaomi are among those creating new forms of digital connectivity and inter-
dependencies across the regions and boundaries of Belt and Road. Of impor-
tance here is China’s increasingly powerful app economy and digital payment
infrastructure. With over 60 percent of China’s population now online and
travel bookings evenly split between desktop and mobile phones, apps such as
WeChat, Ctrip and Qyer play a critical role in shaping outbound tourism. Given
these platforms are the primary locations where countries, itineraries, attrac-
tions, restaurants and individual shops are marketed, ranked and discussed,
China’s app economy heavily influences where and when Chinese tourists travel,
1392 T. WINTER

how they discover and share new places, how they book and how they pay.
Chinese tourism, and the vast windfalls it now promises, thus exerts
a gravitational force, pulling countries into this digital ecosystem. Union Pay,
WeChat and others are platforms through which Serbia, Greece, Turkey, or
Georgia – to return to the Black Sea region – must market themselves if they are
to be visible, and have their booking and payment systems in place if they are to
transact. As Demchak (2019) and Lee (2018) note, such platforms also represent
significant AI assets for the Chinese state going forward. What is evident here
then is that accounting for Silk Road heritage tourism as merely soft-power
misses the ways in which it is entangled in and advances the broader political
and economic agendas of Belt and Road.
My core argument here is that through Belt and Road we are now seeing
new forms of cultural power emerging. The Silk Roads provide China with
a unique platform to exercise its geocultural advantage as a civilisational state.
Geocultural power is about organising culture and history in ways that aggre-
gate state power. This works both within the confines of the nation-state and,
crucially, beyond it. The degree to which such extra-territorial zones of cultural
influence constitute resources of state power today is a highly complex ques-
tion. Clearly, religion, language, diaspora, as well as cultural practices and
landscapes of antiquity can be mobilised or even contrived into particular
forms to exert influence. Today China is far from alone in seeking, acquiring
and building geocultural power. India, Japan, Iran and Turkey are among the
civilisational states whose cultural influence spread much farther than
present day borders. Indeed, I would argue that today we are seeing the
emergence of a new era of geocultural competition as medium and great
powers seek primacy at the regional or global level. Eurasia is the epicentre
of this competition as visions of civilisational futures and continental cultural
histories undergird expansionist ambitions. Belt and Road illustrates how
geocultural ambition can shape alliances and rivalries and orient foreign
policies that on the one hand speak to long-term ambitions and, on the
other hand, can be recalibrated as geopolitical circumstances change.
Vladimir Putin’s speech during the Conference on Dialogue of Asian
Civilizations in Beijing in May 2019 included multiple references to Eurasian
shared pasts in favour of Beijing’s Silk Roads, a clear nod to the Eurasianism of
Russian expansionism. These competing geocultural discourses reveal coopera-
tion may be less stable than the diplomatic rhetoric proclaims.

Conclusion
Belt and Road has been presented as a ‘revival’ of the Silk Roads for the
twenty-first century. What we have seen here then is that the geopolitics of
today is rewriting world history. In the decades following World War II the
depiction and imagining of Asia’s past was largely articulated around the
 GEOPOLITICS 1393

nation-state. This methodological nationalism, as Duara (1995) refers to it,

came to be overlaid by emergent ideas about the global and globalisation,
which flourished in the post-Cold War period (see also Rosenau 2003). Belt
and Road is creating the material conditions for a new way of imagining
Asia’s past, giving visibility to much neglected themes and regions, with the
Indian Ocean, Central Asia and the movements of technologies across the
Islamic world among the examples that might be cited. Geocultural power is
about having the capacity to write and map geocultural histories, steering
which events, places and people are assembled into strategically expedient
narratives. The Silk Roads afford China such forms of geocultural power.
But I also want to emphasise here how they operate as geocultural imagin-
aries creating new realities in the present. Fundamentally important to the
project of BRI, and as Sidaway and Woon (2017) note, the Silk Road creates
the imaginary of continental connectivity. In so doing it transforms Asia into
Eurasia as the unit of analysis and discussion. And through the two routes –
overland and maritime – it is a vision of Eurasia connected by land and sea,
one that also reaches across to Africa and up to the Arctic. At the centre of this
discourse of geography sits China, regaining its place as ‘The Middle Kingdom’
of both world history and of contemporary international affairs. Chinese state
funding, the AIIB, COSCO, Huawei, Tencent and so forth constitute the
asymmetrical power relations through which this Eurasian connectivity is
constituted. But in the Silk Roads we see another topography being created,
one where countries and civilisations, which – it is declared – share parity, are
aligned into modes of cooperation for the win-win dividends that come from
'mutual respect'; the so-called ‘shared destiny’ of Belt and Road cooperation.
The analysis offered here points to the need for critically understanding how
these grand arcs of connectivity co-create each other. As noted earlier, in the
post-Cold War period, the Silk Road emerged as a geostrategic concept as
governments in Central Asia, along with Japan, South Korea, and subsequently
the United States all developed Silk Road foreign policies. Belt and Road
advances this dynamic in significant ways. It popularises Silk Road metaphors
of connectivity that harbour new forms of power within a language of friend-
ship, dialogue and cooperation. In his opening speech to the Conference on
Dialogue of Asian Civilizations in May 2019, Xi Jinping noted ‘civilizations are
all equal, not one is superior’ (Xi Jinping 2019). But Kamola’s (2019) observa-
tions of how the global as a geocultural imaginary came to be fashioned are
a reminder that visions of Eurasian and global connectivity, as projected
through the Silk Roads, will inevitably be constructed through the asymmetries
of BRI’s trade and political relations, and the ‘weight’ of Chinese civilisation
relative to its regional counterparts. Belt and Road has taken the themes of
peace, exchange and friendship of the Silk Road – all of which formed in quite
different contexts – and migrated them to a world where connectivity holds
ever greater economic and geopolitical significance.
1394 T. WINTER

This raises important questions as the Silk Road also embeds itself in the
nomenclature of analysis. As Medhurst et al. (1997) demonstrate, scholarly
accounts of the Cold War centred around a language of competition, moves
and counter-moves, tactics and resources; discourses that did not merely
reflect the realities of the period but actively contributed to them. The
intellectual remapping of Eurasia that we are seeing today, in ways that
include its surrounding oceans as a single geopolitical and geocultural
space, actively creates new political and social realities.
Expansionist states need to build a cultural fabric, both at home and
abroad. Postcolonial scholars such as Bennett (2018), Edwards (2007),
Reid (2002), Guha-Thakurta (2004), Said (1995) and others have demon-
strated the role played by national museums, sites of antiquity, and
associated discourses of anthropology and archaeology, in the construc-
tion of European empire. Nineteenth century cultural institutions and the
ways of knowing and ordering the world they created were instrumental
in legitimising the project of empire, and creating its hierarchies and
citizens. Clearly strategies for acquiring influence and resources in the
twenty-first century continue to shift. In the political map of today, power
is most readily accumulated by building connectivities, of trade, infra-
structure, finance and of culture. China, India and Russia remain multi-
cultural states with great power ambitions. In all three, twentieth century
practices of statecraft involved forging histories and identities around the
geo-body of the nation. This is not in abeyance, but what we see in the
Silk Roads, in their partnerships and their rival projects, is the strategic
deployment of culture, religion and history in ways that powerfully com-
bine nationalist and internationalist imperatives. To date Belt and Road
has been read as an infrastructure, logistics and trade initiative. This paper
has argued we need to also see it as a geocultural project. Introducing the
geocultural brings in new dimensions to debates about the long-term,
global ramifications of Belt and Road, both reinforcing and complicating
existing arguments. In the Silk Roads we see how geocultural power is not
so much territorial, but nodal, fashioned along certain routes, and enacted
by a multitude of actors. As with geoeconomic and geopolitical power it is
contingent on relationships and alliances and susceptible to shifts therein.
It is also open to contestation and localised forms of refutation. And while
the full implications of geocultural power will take time to discern, Belt
and Road suggests its ascendant nature, and in an era where power is
increasingly accumulated by building connectivities across multiple sectors
I would suggest it is doing considerable work in remaking the interna-
tional power landscape of today.
 GEOPOLITICS 1395

Notes
1. For an overview of these projects see www.silkroadfutures.net.
2. In his opening address to the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations Xi stated:
‘In the many places I have visited around the world, what fascinates me the most is
civilizations in their rich diversity, I cannot but think of the Central Asian city of
Samarkand, the Luxor Temple in Egypt, Sentosa in Singapore, Wat Pra Kaew in
Bangkok, and the Acropolis in Athens, to mention just a few. China is ready to work
with other countries to protect Asian cultural heritage, and better preserve and sustain
our civilisations’ (Xi Jinping 2019).
3. Wallerstein (1991) cites the histories of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the
imperial experiences of Britain and France to argue geoculture, geopolitics and geoe-
conomics are all inextricably bound up in one another.
4. In 2011 Xi dedicated a plenary session of the 17th Central Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party to the issue, and has stated that the China Dream involves the
renaissance of Chinese civilisation (Shambaugh 2013). The emergence of the ‘Asia-
Pacific Dream’ in 2014 and its internationally more inclusive language reflected an
attempt to address concerns held across the region over Beijing’s growing ambitions.
5. Since 2014 Guangzhou has also hosted Guangdong 21st Century Maritime Silk Road
International Expo (Guangdong 21st Century Maritime Silk Road International Expo
2019).
6. At the same time, the Silk Roads also represent a highly effective pedagogical context
for communicating the cultural high points of Chinese history to tourists from other
countries as they travel to China and around the region.

Disclosure statement
I confirm that I do not have any relationships with individuals or organisations that pose
a conflict of interest in relation to the subject matter nor do I stand to gain any financial
benefits from the publications of this article.

Funding
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant FT170100084.

ORCID
Tim Winter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5825-6012

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