China’s Silk Web Terrestrial Ideoscape: Opportunities and Challenges

President Xi Jinping’s ambitious plan to make China the center of the world again by reviving the ancient Land and Oceanic Silk Road trading route faces obstacles yet carves new possibilities of global terrestrial Ideoscape.

China retains considerable economic power, diplomatic reach and involvement in international community, which enable it to exercise influence and have impact worldwide. However, due to the porous but partially exclusive global relation mechanisms, China finds it’s difficult to merge into, and finally become a fully dedicated member. Therefore, China needs a set of new conceptual, ideological and socio-cultural frameworks to re-engage the world. In this sense, China is still struggling with the grueling distance between its current identity and capability to its desired prowess and ambition.

The legacy of empire and stereotype of post-communism complicates China’s image in East Asia, South East Asia and much more diverse region in other Silk Road Countries. The convoluted and exacerbated domestic mal-governance could damage its reputation as an open society and constructive partner, due to the fact that many foreign countries tend to be vigilant of accepting Chinese capital, at the same time thinking possible “antidotes” for his defects as represented in such aspects as environment, social justice, trade inequality, primarization, etc.

China can only sustain and embrace its positive profile by engaging with the different “domestic issues” masked as international relations, which means acknowledging more actively that other stakeholders’ emergence opportunities and continued regional stability.

China’s re-entry into the world, through Silk Road Initiative – and many other kinds – would have a lukewarm and limited impact on its profile and international partnership building, if its strategies were based on maneuvering, contestation and para-conspiracy. China’s Silk Road needs other specific and up-to-date objects (replacing the pre-modern and imperialist “tributary silk trade”) and subjects to offer possibilities of co-defining new terrestrial scapes, among all players.

In order to accomplish this goal, China should first and foremost, adopt new ways of governance, both in international arena and domestic contexts – in an age when everything is global and webbed.

Tapping international potentials, measuring relevance and influence in the world is complex. This is especially true, in China’s case, when its history haunted by amnesia, economy infested by GDP-oriented, post-socialist mercantilism and society ruptured by inequality. How to communicate better to Chinese public and the world the connotations and potentials of Silk Road Web? What are the strategies and visionary solutions to concretize this conceptual framework? How should China engage its historical legacies as a rising power without debunk the global system? China needs to pontificate all these questions before initiate any new international projects.

It argues that the building of China’s industrial strength, diplomatic reach and soft power potential should based on unlearning and relearning some basic lessons to enable it envision and imagine a new global land/oceanic scape, maintaining a high international profile.

There are three points to make about all this in the context of China’s new global balancing endeavor, occasioned by a rather controversial and challenging international background: the worsening antagonism between NATO and Russia, Syria Crisis and risks posed by ISIS, global economy meltdown, degradation of South China Sea contestation and pandemic of Ebola.

First, China should treat its entry into the world as a socio-political seismic incidence, which will result in constitutional imbalance, institutional shifts, partnership reorganization and economic restructuring – our ability to play a constructive and influential role in the world will inevitably suffer if China can not come up with, together with other participants, a new media and knowledge convergence system.

This new media endeavor should be treated not only as communicative functions, but more as hermeneutic function, which permits the new rising powers to inherit their traditions and regurgitate their collectivities in a more constructive way. Collectivities develop a habitus – a system of durable dispositions to act – and through identity construction, normative and hermeneutic means, and traditions can also slip into the bodies (as in this case China and some other rivaling countries along Silk Road Belt) and whispering to their hibernated “humiliated” souls.

Second, if China want to balance other debilitating suspicious pressures within Silk Road Region, and decrease the likelihood of China being alienated in Asia and being misunderstood as gargantuan, avaricious and pragmatist nouveau riche country; it should have mindsets and paradigm shifts in terms of sea governance, social collaboration, risks responsiveness and resources management. China should engage more actively in the Asia through imaginative and constructive ocean management mechanisms, at same time to secure enough best practices, strategic co-prosperity toolkits to maintain its role and live up to its promises as an emergent power.

Accordingly, by using Silk Road concept, China should work as catalyst and adhesive to glue together the already polarized, dichotomized and de-balanced world through a new agenda which focusing on immediate, direct, contingent issues confronting us all, such as acidization of ocean, deep-sea administration, ocean floor industrialization, coral reef protection, bio-diversity campaign, treatment of diluvial pollutants, South China Sea Welfare mechanism, pro-active responsiveness to water-borne disasters, etc.

Third, if there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about whether China and Silk Road Web ‘mattered’ in Asia and beyond, China should start to address some overseas governance/management scenarios in domestic occasion; evidenced by the huge African community formed in Guangzhou, heterogeneous Muslim population in Xinjiang, Shaanxi and Yunnan, Burmese diasporas in Southwest China and disputes over governance represented in Hong Kong. These issues are all related to Land/Oceanic Silk Road Region – as it traversed from China’s eastern coastal line, downward to Southeast Asia, detours in India sub-continent finally ends Africa; at the same time spans from Muslim countries in west Asia, all the way to the heartland of European countries.

In this sense, China’s new Silk Road diplomacy should not use as spatial imaginaries tools to divide, integrate, re-divided global scapes according to the discursive interests of rising powers, but to refashion China’s foreign policy and internationalization campaign as ethics. According to Jan Aart Scholte, rising globality is about a “growth of trans-planetary and more particularly supra-territorial social relations.” Silk Road conceptual framework should be used a new mechanism to breed more familiarity among countries reside within Silk Road Region, which are no longer binding together under archaic silk related memories.

As for China, an ideal effort to make the “foreign” appear less “foreign”, amongst Silk Road Belt/Region, is start to envision the inbound Silk Road population within its own territory (especially African and Muslim population in Southern and Northwestern China) as opportunities to test China’s capability of global governance and Land/Oceanic Silk Road affairs administration.