Reading Spykman in Beijing. Why the Rimland theory can explain (in part) China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Nicholas John Spykman is one of the most frequently cited authors of classical geopolitics, and his Rimland Theory is often introduced to counterbalance the Heartland approach when it comes to explaining recent geopolitical developments. China occupies a central position in the original design of the Rimland, mainly because of the size of its population and the progressive expansion of its industrial capacity. Also, as Spykman himself wrote in 1938, “Unless the dreams of European Confederation should materialize, it may well be that fifty years from now the quadrumvirate of world powers will be China, India, the United States, and the U.S.S.R”. This paper presents China, and in particular China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the perfect case study to discuss the geographical and geopolitical factors that have offered Beijing the possibility to follow the Rimland design to structure its new strategic posture. After discussing the existing Western and Chinese literature to explore the nuances of the current debate on the origins, the rationale, and the objective of the BRI, the paper introduces the Rimland concept to show how this Spykmanian theory is able to explain better than any other theoretical framework China’s geopolitical perspectives and ambitions. Reminding that the Chinese project has explicitly recognized the European peninsula as its “final destination”, with the exclusion of India and the active involvement of the Middle East, the BRI directly calls into question three of the four power poles of the Eurasian coast identified by Spykman. However, the paper also recognizes that the Rimland Theory was conceived to explain a world based on power dynamics that does not exist anymore. For this reason, an update is proposed to use the theory to describe contemporary geopolitical evolutions. Using Chinese Confucian tradition and the traditional Tributary literature, the paper discusses a Chinese adaptation to the Rimland theory that could potentially explain the inner objective of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious project.