How to Cite:
Wang, J.
& Sowers, N.
(2023) “The Belt and Road Initiative: An Integrative Subject for Interdisciplinary Studies about China”,
Education About Asia. 28(1).
doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.1829
Editor's Note: This is a useful and well-written article that instructors can use with students. It is also important for young people to specifically consider the content in the sidebars on the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian suppression of religious freedom.
Premier Zhu of China and President Clinton. Source: Screen capture from the video, Welcoming Ceremony for Premier Zhu Rongji w/ Pres. Clinton (1999), on YouTube at https://tinyurl.com/mr37bhwv.
China's economic transformation altered the global economy in unexpected ways. In 2000 when Bill Clinton encouraged Congress to support China's ascension to the World Trade Organization (WTO), his argument centered on the belief that once Chinese society saw the power and the benefits of capitalism, it would demand political and economic freedom, and the power of free markets would propel China to economic prosperity. Twenty-plus years later, China has discovered its own path to economic wellness, one that continues to support the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with political power largely unquestioned. The economy is the second largest in the world and the largest under standards of purchasing power parity (the exchange rate that would translate renminbi to dollars and allow someone to buy the same basket of goods in either country).' China's investment in its own infrastructure and the development of industry in technology, finance, and artificial intelligence make the country a daunting global competitor.
Given China's rise and its explicit resolution to follow its own path, an understanding of China's economic transformation and global strategy is imperative for American students preparing for careers. The vast differences in culture and worldview of Chinese society suggest that simply applying the standard business transaction and replacing US dollars with Chinese renminbi is not enough to promise success when dealing with China. Our students deserve an interdisciplinary approach to what it means to trade in China, within the confines of an authoritarian government, yes, but one that recognizes, from the perspective of Chinese leadership and possibly most Chinese, a different, but rational perspective to economic decision-making.
We show how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can be an integrative topic for an interdisciplinary course dedicated to preparing majors in both International Business and Asian Studies for the world landscape they will encounter. Using the BRI as a compilation project at the end, the course allows students to explore and harness the perspectives we spent time developing throughout the semester. By scaffolding perspective through the lens of cultural ethos and policy positions in early writing assignments, students prepare to look from China outward to the rest of the world analyzing the incentives and motivations behind China's global finance model.
The Economist argues, “The Communist Party is using the BRI to reshape a world order more to its liking.”
The BRI, as a core strategy for realizing the China Dream, constitutes a coherent trait in China's identity in the twenty-first century. Identity is the "nation-state's view of itself (italics added), comprising the traits of its national character, its intended regional and global roles, and its perceptions of its eventual destiny."9The construction of this national identity is carefully cultivated, leaving out the more troublesome historical periods of CCP leadership, like the Great Leap Forward (and the famine that followed), the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square crackdown. As concerns the BRI, "China sits at the centre of the world, bringing its wealth and power to bear . . . linking people into the concept of China as a beneficent power and an alternative locus to the Wesel° This position has been a long time coming in China's eyes, and reflects a return to its self-perceived rightful position of political and economic power. A discussion about how the BRI is rooted in China's history and tradition can serve as a quick overview of China's identity as viewed within several themes: glorious ancient civilization, a century of humiliation, economic transformation, and dream of national rejuvenation, all of which have been featured extensively in China's national narrative. Though the CCP orchestrates China's national identity, 89 percent of Chinese surveyed, compared to an average 51 percent of survey respondents from 28 different countries, trusted that their government would "do what is right" in 2022." Thus, recognizing that this national narrative prioritizes collective well-being and national glory over individual wants and objectives embodies a worldview fundamentally different from the West, one most citizens indicate that they accept.
To help students develop a concrete sense of the alternative worldview, Alec Ash's (2017) Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New Chine follows the lives of six Chinese millennials as they navigate their place in a quickly changing society through education and career, dating and family, struggles, and dreams. The chapters in the book flip between the six characters in the story. Students can read the introductory chapter of each character to gain a sense of their diverse backgrounds, and discussion on the first day of class can circle around common themes and individual differences between them. For the rest of the book, each student focuses on the chapters about one particular character to get ready to role-play the character in class discussions.
A jigsaw activity is perfect for engaging students in exploring the elements of each perspective in the story. First, students with the same assigned character explore their character and discuss the character's experiences in depth. After that, new groups are formed such that each group contains one person representing each character, ready to share that character's perspective on social issues, such as China's social credit system, zero-COVID-19 policy, gaokao (college entrance exam), immigration to the West, and the "reeducation camps" in Xinjiang. Students are charged to respond in ways they believe the character would respond. This activity is meant to steep students in situations faced by young adults in China today. Asking students to recognize the Chinese perspectives and compare them with their own helps establish a base case for looking at the macroeconomic transformation of the Chinese economy.
BRI and China's Economic Transformation
To develop some perspective for why the BRI approach to aid looks so different from what has been done by the West, we focus on China's economic transformation, drawing from before and after the time when China joined the WTO. We want students to see that growth looks different in the cities and the rural areas, that the fast pace of technological and social changes means that wide swaths of society adjust quickly to things, and that a natural next step is for China to extend what they have learned to other nations. By recognizing the experimental nature of China’s economy and the amazing adaptability of its society, students may begin to view the BRI as a natural extension of these societal attributes so helpful for the economic miracle of the last forty-plus years.
Growth comes with a cost, and China’s steep ascent was not immune to social and environmental consequences.
China’s economic transformation can be traced to the “reform and opening up” in the early 1980s, when a household contract responsibility system was widely adopted in agriculture, though slowly at first, releasing labor to the factories in the newly opened special economic zones (SEZs) on the coast. The transformation accelerated after it joined the WTO in 2001 when China started to privatize more sectors of its economy, and foreign direct investment soared. Economist Isabella Weber studies the experimentalism Chinese policymakers used to make it the factory to the world, assesses the degree to which reform integrated Western economic ideas, and finds evidence of a deliberate choice to not embrace economic shock therapy, the liberalization of markets, the freeing of prices, and securing of property rights all at once.13 China’s resistance to Western economic prescriptions meant a new economic model, socialism with Chinese characteristics, one that facilitated lots of growth, very quickly. Helping students understand what that might look like and feel like for the average citizens from pre-WTO China is a learning outcome we seek. One way to give undergraduate students a concrete idea of the transformation is to have them learn about what life felt like in China before and after the WTO, in cities versus more rural areas. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s article in the New York Times offers a peek at life in Beijing in the late 1990s—a life that looks a lot like middle-class suburbia in the United States.14 Filled with fast-food franchises, SUV-like vehicles, and children’s soccer leagues, life in big Chinese cities was booming and vital even before trade opened up. But this has not been true in the western and rural regions of the country, where a noticeable wealth gap rivals or exceeds that in America. To see how WTO ascension led to 4x GDP and 5x exports in 10 years, we link Rosenthal’s article to Harvard Business Review editor Adi Ignatius’s 2021 interview with Weijian Shan, the CEO of private equity firm PAG.15 Comparing capitalism and socialism in the US and in China, Shan points out several ironies about institutions in the two countries that might surprise both sides. Placing students into small groups to brainstorm what they knew about the capitalist and socialist aspects of the two countries, what they want to know, and what they learned from the reading leads to fruitful discussion.
To stimulate critical discussions about the economic transformation’s social impact in more rural areas, we read the award-winning writer Dexter Roberts’ The Myth of Chinese Capitalism (2020), which focuses on the picture that China paints for the world about its economic success versus the experience on the ground of the people making manufacturing profits possible. Students develop the sense that economic opportunity is not equal across China, that labor in China may be accomplished under grueling work requirements, and that the future of inward economic development is not assured going forward. Two useful supplementary resources were Chinese American journalist Leslie Chang’s TED talk “The voices of China’s workers’’ and the Youth China Group’s founder Zak Dychtwald’s YouTube video “China’s New Innovation Advantage.” Chang’s talk reveals the factory girl’s perspective, which is informative but not explored in Roberts’s book.16 Dychtwald’s podcast brings together Chinese youth resilience, innovation, and technology markets, and serves as a good prompt for students to think through the massive changes faced by the average young person in China and reflect on what that might mean for innovation there in the near future.17 Essay prompts ask students to use evidence from the texts, videos, and resources in class to support, refute, or modify the Dychtwald thesis to analyze ways to manage competition with China.
The economic transformation offers two lessons that can help us analyze the BRI. First, in reforming their economy China did not accept all aspects of what was prescribed by the West. Second, the economic transformation was an exercise in crossing the river by feeling for the stones, meaning it began with experimentation. Chinese policy starts small and expands on success. The rollout of the BRI started slowly, gaining momentum as countries entered memorandums of understanding with China. Today, Xi reiterates a decades long time horizon for partner investments, however the scale of the commitments can hardly be described as experimental any longer.
BRI and “Ecological Civilization”
Growth comes with a cost, and China’s steep ascent was not immune to social and environmental consequences. We spend a good part of the semester analyzing both the social and environmental externalities that come from growth without careful regulation. By building on the wealth gap that becomes clear in the economic module, several social impacts are considered: the left-behind children, family reverence and local customs, the rise of the super-rich, and village relocation are just a few. Each topic helps to lay the groundwork for students to see the ways that China carries its aspiration of ecological civilization into BRI planning.18
The environmental degradation that comes with too many factories and no established property rights carries tremendous impact on clean air, water, and biodiversity. To prime the pump for looking at these tradeoffs, we read and discussed English social scientist Gregory Bateson’s essay “The roots of ecological crisis.”19 Bateson points out that the root cause of the ecological crisis is the failure to balance economic growth, the environment, and human hubris. We use a dialectical notebook with students, a teaching technique commonly used in English and social studies courses to identify key text from an article and explain its significance, to elicit critical thinking about what an ecological civilization might look like. Each student takes two
blank pages of an open notebook and creates four columns. In the first column, the student chooses a quote that spoke to them, reflects on the meaning, and poses a question before passing their notebook. The next student considers the first column and tries to answer the question and poses another before passing it forward. In this way, students have a conversation on paper. As a group, we share takeaways out loud. This is a good activity to involve many students in the conversation, especially ones not eager to share through typical discussion.
Another way to harness student attention to the issues is to show them the twenty-sixminute version of Wang Jiuliang’s 2016 documentary Plastic China,which was banned in mainland China.
Another way to harness student attention to the issues is to show them the twenty-six-minute version of Wang Jiuliang’s 2016 documentary Plastic China,which was banned in mainland China.20 The short version features the massive importation of trash from developed countries to a small village where workers pick through the debris for recyclable plastic using an unregulated process, employing methods that would never be allowed in the countries of origin. China ships out its exports and imports this refuse, taking advantage of the transportation dynamic.21Articles on air pollution in the cities clarify further environmental realities for city dwellers.
We choose selected excerpts from Professor of Environmental Studies Yifei Li and International Relations Professor and scholar on China’s environment Judith Shapiro’s book China Goes Green to help students understand the complexities of environmental issues in China.22 In response to a number of nations’ criticisms about negative consequences for the host state’s ecosystem, China’s government advocates a “green” BRI, committing to not building coal-fueled power plants abroad any longer. Li and Shapiro’s research, however, raises many concerns about China’s environmental policies and practices. Exploring the ramifications of growing so much so fast and the implication for future growth helps students develop a more balanced ecological perspective on the BRI.
BRI and Globalization
China touts the BRI as a platform for international cooperation toward achieving “a community with a shared future for mankind.” Its five goals include policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bonds among the countries. China’s BRI vision challenges the current model of globalization based on a more Western economic ideal. How will the BRI impact the future of the globalized world? We ask our students to share their answers.
We introduce this question and the project early in the term so students can be thinking about the project throughout the semester. We ask students to create a Human Barometer, a technique popularized by Facing History and Ourselves, by lining up across the classroom to measure their current position on: will the BRI impact the globalized world in a positive or negative way?23 Students choose their location in line to mirror the strength of their convictions, those that see the BRI as negative on one end versus positive on the other. It is not really a surprise when students line up to indicate a negative influence from the BRI. If they have paid any attention to the issues in the news, that will generally be the only perspective with which they are familiar.
To gain insights into the BRI’s global impact, students work in teams. Each team chooses a BRI country or region of their interest, identifies evidence of BRI impact, and discusses whether the BRI will bring about a win-win situation for both sides of the BRI transaction. At the end of the presentations, students synthesize the evidence they found and ponder the future of globalization. The same call for a Human Barometer after the last BRI presentation may be one measure of the degree to which we have successfully introduced perspective and perception over the course of the term. At the very least, their answers should be more complex, and the weight in the Barometer is more in the middle.
Conclusion
Student success after college depends on an ability to look at transactions and controversies from alternative angles and siloed disciplinary coverage will not effectively highlight the synergy behind a complex country like modern China. We demonstrated how the BRI serves as a culminating topic for an interdisciplinary course on China, naturally integrating inquiries about China’s history, economy, social and natural environments, and global role with respect to the rest of the world. The course materials and activities were designed specially to facilitate an integrative understanding of China’s people, markets, and its institutions and how they operate.
By emphasizing perspective throughout the course–historic, economic, and ecological–we offer students a foundation for considering motivations and expectations of the parties actually involved in the BRI agreements. This focus often offers a notably different answer to the question, “Why do this investment?” than many responses typical of Western democracies. Making students aware of biases within both perspectives, including political posturing, reinforces our teaching goal to have them think critically about China’s global connections.
BRI as a Coherent Trait of China's Identity
To help students develop a concrete sense of the alternative worldview, Alec Ash's (2017) Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New Chine follows the lives of six Chinese millennials as they navigate their place in a quickly changing society through education and career, dating and family, struggles, and dreams. The chapters in the book flip between the six characters in the story. Students can read the introductory chapter of each character to gain a sense of their diverse backgrounds, and discussion on the first day of class can circle around common themes and individual differences between them. For the rest of the book, each student focuses on the chapters about one particular character to get ready to role-play the character in class discussions.
A jigsaw activity is perfect for engaging students in exploring the elements of each perspective in the story. First, students with the same assigned character explore their character and discuss the character's experiences in depth. After that, new groups are formed such that each group contains one person representing each character, ready to share that character's perspective on social issues, such as China's social credit system, zero-COVID-19 policy, gaokao (college entrance exam), immigration to the West, and the "reeducation camps" in Xinjiang. Students are charged to respond in ways they believe the character would respond. This activity is meant to steep students in situations faced by young adults in China today. Asking students to recognize the Chinese perspectives and compare them with their own helps establish a base case for looking at the macroeconomic transformation of the Chinese economy.
China’s economic transformation can be traced to the “reform and opening up” in the early 1980s, when a household contract responsibility system was widely adopted in agriculture, though slowly at first, releasing labor to the factories in the newly opened special economic zones (SEZs) on the coast. The transformation accelerated after it joined the WTO in 2001 when China started to privatize more sectors of its economy, and foreign direct investment soared. Economist Isabella Weber studies the experimentalism Chinese policymakers used to make it the factory to the world, assesses the degree to which reform integrated Western economic ideas, and finds evidence of a deliberate choice to not embrace economic shock therapy, the liberalization of markets, the freeing of prices, and securing of property rights all at once.13 China’s resistance to Western economic prescriptions meant a new economic model, socialism with Chinese characteristics, one that facilitated lots of growth, very quickly. Helping students understand what that might look like and feel like for the average citizens from pre-WTO China is a learning outcome we seek. One way to give undergraduate students a concrete idea of the transformation is to have them learn about what life felt like in China before and after the WTO, in cities versus more rural areas. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s article in the New York Times offers a peek at life in Beijing in the late 1990s—a life that looks a lot like middle-class suburbia in the United States.14 Filled with fast-food franchises, SUV-like vehicles, and children’s soccer leagues, life in big Chinese cities was booming and vital even before trade opened up. But this has not been true in the western and rural regions of the country, where a noticeable wealth gap rivals or exceeds that in America. To see how WTO ascension led to 4x GDP and 5x exports in 10 years, we link Rosenthal’s article to Harvard Business Review editor Adi Ignatius’s 2021 interview with Weijian Shan, the CEO of private equity firm PAG.15 Comparing capitalism and socialism in the US and in China, Shan points out several ironies about institutions in the two countries that might surprise both sides. Placing students into small groups to brainstorm what they knew about the capitalist and socialist aspects of the two countries, what they want to know, and what they learned from the reading leads to fruitful discussion.
To stimulate critical discussions about the economic transformation’s social impact in more rural areas, we read the award-winning writer Dexter Roberts’ The Myth of Chinese Capitalism (2020), which focuses on the picture that China paints for the world about its economic success versus the experience on the ground of the people making manufacturing profits possible. Students develop the sense that economic opportunity is not equal across China, that labor in China may be accomplished under grueling work requirements, and that the future of inward economic development is not assured going forward. Two useful supplementary resources were Chinese American journalist Leslie Chang’s TED talk “The voices of China’s workers’’ and the Youth China Group’s founder Zak Dychtwald’s YouTube video “China’s New Innovation Advantage.” Chang’s talk reveals the factory girl’s perspective, which is informative but not explored in Roberts’s book.16 Dychtwald’s podcast brings together Chinese youth resilience, innovation, and technology markets, and serves as a good prompt for students to think through the massive changes faced by the average young person in China and reflect on what that might mean for innovation there in the near future.17 Essay prompts ask students to use evidence from the texts, videos, and resources in class to support, refute, or modify the Dychtwald thesis to analyze ways to manage competition with China.
The economic transformation offers two lessons that can help us analyze the BRI. First, in reforming their economy China did not accept all aspects of what was prescribed by the West. Second, the economic transformation was an exercise in crossing the river by feeling for the stones, meaning it began with experimentation. Chinese policy starts small and expands on success. The rollout of the BRI started slowly, gaining momentum as countries entered memorandums of understanding with China. Today, Xi reiterates a decades long time horizon for partner investments, however the scale of the commitments can hardly be described as experimental any longer.
Another way to harness student attention to the issues is to show them the twenty-six-minute version of Wang Jiuliang’s 2016 documentary Plastic China,which was banned in mainland China.20 The short version features the massive importation of trash from developed countries to a small village where workers pick through the debris for recyclable plastic using an unregulated process, employing methods that would never be allowed in the countries of origin. China ships out its exports and imports this refuse, taking advantage of the transportation dynamic.21Articles on air pollution in the cities clarify further environmental realities for city dwellers.
We choose selected excerpts from Professor of Environmental Studies Yifei Li and International Relations Professor and scholar on China’s environment Judith Shapiro’s book China Goes Green to help students understand the complexities of environmental issues in China.22 In response to a number of nations’ criticisms about negative consequences for the host state’s ecosystem, China’s government advocates a “green” BRI, committing to not building coal-fueled power plants abroad any longer. Li and Shapiro’s research, however, raises many concerns about China’s environmental policies and practices. Exploring the ramifications of growing so much so fast and the implication for future growth helps students develop a more balanced ecological perspective on the BRI.