Mapping China’s Strategic Space: Borderlands

The Borderlands research project investigates how China invests in, engages with, and deepens its presence within its land and maritime border neighbors, in an attempt to reshape its immediate periphery.

This research effort constitutes the second phase of NBR’s Mapping China’s Strategic Space project, which defined strategic space as a realm vital to the pursuit of China’s national economic and security objectives and to the enduring survival of the Chinese state, a realm over which Beijing aspires to freely wield its influence and assert its leadership.

The borderland areas surrounding China’s national territory are a critical component of its strategic space. Whereas China’s geopolitical horizons stretch globally, its capacity to exercise control and effectively exert its transformative power over the full extent of its desired strategic space is still uncertain. By contrast, China’s contiguous regions, situated in its immediate reach, present opportunities for making use of power and wealth asymmetries, testing out methods that may become trademarks of a future globally dominant China, and laying the ground for an entirely reconfigured Asia. In addition, shaping a cooperative neighborhood appears as the necessary preliminary step towards ensuring that Beijing’s global ambitions can eventually come to pass.

The project examines the practice of Chinese statecraft in the fourteen countries with which it shares a land border [1] (North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam), and six countries with which it shares a maritime border (South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia). Following Beijing’s own priorities as defined by the Global Initiatives on Development, Security, and Civilization (GDI, GSI, and GCI), the analysis is conducted across the economic, security, and political domains.

The Borderlands Dashboard visually will present data collected on parameters across the three domains to China’s engagement with its borderlands neighbors since 2013, the year when the Chinese party-state began designating them as China’s “periphery.” Research papers, commentaries, and Q&As, will provide in-depth case studies by scholars based in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

The Borderlands podcast, produced as a series of audio documentaries, will accompany the written publications to examine additional aspects of China’s borderlands statecraft.

Finally, four conferences (in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Northeast Asia), gathering scholars that bring local perspectives and shed light on local responses to China’s efforts, will conclude the project’s cycle.

 

Mapping China’s Strategic Space

The Mapping China’s Strategic Space project builds on the work the National Bureau of Asian Research has led over the past decade, aimed at apprehending Chinese intellectual and political elites’ attempts to define a vision of their country as a great power on the world stage.

The project’s objective is to better understand what constitutes the imagined space beyond China’s national borders that its leaders consider as vital to the pursuit of national political, economic, and security objectives and to the achievement of China’s rise.

Whereas Russia has coined the term “near-abroad” to describe the area it hoped to maintain its influence over after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and whereas several Western countries have embraced the term “Indo-Pacific” as a strategic concept denoting their willingness to maintain a free and open region, Beijing’s conception of its expanded strategic space is still unclear to the outside world. Other than through territorial claims, China’s affirmation of the delineations of its strategic space is usually expressed in negative ways: the Chinese leadership believes that Western countries, spearheaded by the United States, want to “contain, encircle, and suppress” China.[2] The perception of encirclement, sometimes described as an effort by hostile foreign powers to “squeeze China’s strategic space,” inhabits the political imaginations and reflects deeply rooted conceptions of constraints over the Chinese nation’s “geo-body.”[3]

Understanding how China’s strategic space is defined and envisioned is crucial because it will have an impact on the structure and objectives of China’s diplomacy and influence the country’s strategic decisions. It could also point toward areas of contention or conflict with the West.

The Mapping China’s Strategic Space project examines both the historical context and the geopolitical underpinnings of China’s conceptualization of its strategic space. Looking back into history is an indispensable first step that provides comparative perspectives and helps in identifying the drivers of previous efforts to expand strategic space. Since geopolitics is at the intersection of mental maps and strategic goals, the project also explores the geopolitical influences, spatial representations, narrative depictions, and new frontiers of China’s strategic space.

The project is generously funded by a Carnegie Corp. New York grant.

Endnotes

[1] As they are claimed by the PRC.

[2] Chun Han Wong, Keith Zhai and James T. Areddy, “China’s Xi Jinping Takes Rare Direct Aim at U.S. in Speech,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2023.

[3] According to Thongchai Winichakul, the geo-body of a nation “is a man-made territorial definition which creates effects—by classifying, communicating, and enforcement—on people, things and relationships.” See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994)