UC Santa Barbara

Focusing on the unquestioned basis of the Silk Road as an enlivening historical concept, I suggest that conversations about China’s rising power miss the complexity of its peculiar diplomacy, which has been used to legitimate and justify a foreign policy project referred to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). This dissertation makes a case for the Silk Road Redux, or a revival of ideas of connection circulating across infrastructural, technological and multimedia components that began to re-present the development of China’s incorporation into modern world system as well as its central role in the transnational network of supply chains. Combining global history, geopolitics, infrastructure, development, cultural and media studies, I position the Silk Road as an analytical category to better understand the BRI and modern China.

This in-depth study of historical texts, blueprints and physical objects, suggests the necessity to reconsider ideas about great power relations and soft power globally. I argue that the Silk Road has become an ambient and social aesthetic to be reprised in a larger project of worlding China. This approach allows me to develop an understanding of an ambitious power, which manifests itself in the material world as well as promotes, legitimizes and justifies its physical presence globally. This dissertation is composed of four chapters, a prologue and an epilogue.

The Prologue begins with the 1907 Peking-Paris race that sets the stage for an enduring desire to shrink distance, conquer hostile terrain, and provide the possibility of achieving the unattainable. The Introduction describes the BRI, positions it within the current literature in relation to the Silk Road, as well as sketches the air of romance and mystique associated with the cultural heritage of ancient connectivity. Chapter I focuses on the BRI’s antecedent by exploring the various ways in which divergent ideas, meanings and memories of worldliness formed a collective dream that connected vast geographies and survived centuries.

Chapter II interrogates the journey the Silk Road idea took to become a cultural imaginary – from the birth of the concept in 1877, I sketch the movement of the Silk Road idea across global circuits of geological knowledge. Chapter III traces the circulation of the Silk Road imaginary in both political and popular discourse to eventually became an icon of cosmopolitan connectivity. Chapter IV focuses on the BRI as its own agent and actor in the production of a persuasive and plausible ontology of connectivity legitimated with spatial imaginations, drives and ambitions.

The Epilogue furthers scholarly conversation of BRI’s opaque nature by suggesting that the plasticity of the initiative provides new optics to capture the socio-political, economic and cultural forces at play and well as invites further research into the plasticity of the BRI framework. In the Conclusion, I summarize the argument, specifically the Silk Road positioned as a global cultural imaginary and the repercussions of BRI’s malleable political mechanism, which offers a unique opportunity to better understand modern China as a rising and distinctively ambitious global power.