Understanding Education on China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Cultural Political Economy Approach

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a state-driven development campaign that promote economic integration and infrastructure building across Eurasia and beyond, aiming to reconnect countries and revive the prosperity of the historical Silk Road region. Against the background of China’s resurgence as a global power and its ambition in reinvigorating the Silk Road, this paper set out to investigate, within BRI context, in what ways has education been incorporated in policy planning and examine the extent to which initiatives are materialized in practice. Adopting a Cultural Political Economy theoretical framework, the paper positions the analysis in an interdisciplinary paradigm, reflecting upon the prospects, processes and outcomes of education policymaking and development on the New Silk Road. It points out that education arena is an open, dynamic, complex, changing and contested one where different actors from different sectors congregate, interact, negotiate, comply and compromise in their searching for the best “converging interest” in line with the national development agenda. Education as a complex social activity is inadequately explained and justified via any single theory or single lens. The strategic positioning of education into the Belt and Road is best to be seen as a collective unity or ensemble that subject to multiple and contingent determinations of social processes involving meaning making, power relations, and forms of exchange. In problematizing education as a constituent in the making of the BRI, I acknowledge the broader social context in shaping China’s resurgence and the variegated cultural political economy substantiating it. The strategic positioning of education represents a constructive force in imagining, empowering, and materializing the New Silk Road Project, with new ideas, values and norms being circulated within the emergent Silk Road space to form a cultural and epistemological regionalizing project that reinvigorate the Silk Road spirit, together with political economy in reordering the region, reimagining and reshaping a knowledge Silk Road Space.