读书笔记2: Tim Winter's Geocultural power: China’s quest to revive the Silk Roads

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去年一连参加了两个review forum, 连续两次跟political geography 的编辑姐姐合作, 累得吐血. 所以忠告所有研究者, 博士在读期间和full prof 之后应该是写读书论坛的好时间, 其他的时候, 还是要衡量一下自己的时间.

reading Tim Winter's Geocultural power: China’s quest to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century

Topology of heritage and history

June Wang

The field of critical heritage studies has explored the way “heritage” has become a sphere of activity that requires state intervention through policy and legislation. This insight opens new lines of inquiry into the politics of heritage conservation. The idea of heritage was born in post-Napoleonic Europe, when a Westphalian understanding of modern state was solidifying; heritage has therefore been commonly treated as a resource connected to the making of the national state (Ashworth et al., 2012). Scholarship on the geopolitics of heritage has thus concentrated on inter-state conflicts and disputes over the right to possess and mobilize territorial resources (Harrison, 2009).

Geocultural Power is an attempt to rethink the use of heritage through transnational cultural routes, traveling human and non-human things, and selected historical openings. Through the lens of heritage diplomacy, the book traces the entanglement of two Silk Roads — one from the past and the other of the present. This book highlights how particular historical moments and artefacts have become instrumental in enacting contemporary infrastructural projects that connect cities and countries through transnational cooperation and trade. Winter argues that both heritage and history are at the core of China’s strategies of constructing and exercising geocultural power to establish a new order regionally and globally. Winter also calls for an expansive reading of diplomacy that moves beyond government ministries and politicians. His conceptualization of heritage diplomacy encompasses a variety of actors who operate across multiple territories, including philanthropic agencies, cultural and archaeological authorities, scholars, travellers, traders and smugglers. These state and non-state actors constantly turn heritage into a dynamic process that allows them to “represent themselves and their interests to one another” in international contexts (Murray et al., 2011: 709). Winter refuses a singular reading of heritage as property and territorial resource that serves its owner exclusively; instead he shifts attention to routes and nodes, itinerancy and encounters across national boundaries. The focus on routes requires an epistemological shift from the conventional territorial state to concepts of networks and topographies of history.

Winter’s account of the Silk Roads story in its past and present versions exemplifies the complexity of an assemblage in its entirety and its constitutive components (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The Silk Roads have been the object of multiple, distinctive archaeological projects connected to imperial rivalries in Central Asia in the nineteenth century—rivalries that involved Russia’s expansion through inland railways, the development of Britain’s naval resources in the Indian Ocean, and Japan’s diplomatic missions to the Ottoman Empire. The geographical concept of the Silk Road was coined and popularized in the first wave of archaeological projects by European and American scholars, with financial support from Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. A more recent effort of discovering, exhibiting, and memorializing the history of the Silk Roads has been carried out by Japan, in alliance, for example, with Italy, Iraq, the then Soviet Union, and Syria. Today, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for cultural and commercial infrastructures has been undertaken by China, in alliance with Greece, Pakistan, Iran, Kenya, Indonesia, among others. The book thus traces the genealogy of the Silk Roads to a variety of actors—both rivals and allies—providing a subtle, dynamic and complex account rich in variegation and contingency.

Conventional approaches to cultural diplomacy examine soft power as the export of domestic social and cultural goods; this, as cautioned by Winter, still assumes a boundary-oriented reading of sovereignty. Winter argues that the deployment of geocultural power is instructive to shed new light on how one official narrative, when constructed in particular manners, can be used to deal with international relations and domestic governance. To demonstrate his argument, Winter discusses the new spatiality of cultural diplomacy —namely, “corridor diplomacy”, relating to the mobility of people and culture, and “objects of itinerancy”, relating to the mobility of things—in Chapters Four and Five. For instance, when the Silk Roads is constructed as a history of cultural exchange that has nurtured geopolitical cooperation among civilisations in Asia, it then imposes a moral request of peaceful cooperation to all Central Asian countries and regions, Xinjiang included, shall a renaissance of the Silk Roads is expected. The celebration of Zheng He’s voyage was deployed both in a high profile in the Huagang Reef 1 project on the open sea to soothe the tension between China and Vietnam, but also in a low-key manner of subjects making, seen through the young Kenyan woman Mwamaka Sharifu, who plays an “informal ambassadorial role” between Kenya and China respectively (Winter, 2019: 123). Winter’s book offers a network-oriented reading of sovereignty through the two chapters on the mobility of people, and culture and things. He unravels how geoculture is reconfigured topologically by transcending borders, scales, and historical openings.

This book’s interrogation of heritage diplomacy, however, does not delve into how the actual diplomatic negotiations occur or how inter-state agreements or transnational conventions might be institutionalized. This is a missed opportunity. China’s quest to revive the Silk Roads through heritage represents an ideological shift towards connectivity-oriented heritage and a transborder governing regime that strategically plays on UNESCO World Heritage Committee‘s (UNESCO-WHC) recognition of disparate sites that are linked by the mobility of people, things and ideas (Wang, 2019). China’s active participation in rule-making about heritage in and beyond UNESCO has been duly noted (Meskell et al., 2014), but more work needs to be done on the ways international and local experts compare, categorize and reassemble sites/places, and how, in doing so, they can legitimize new political and territorial arrangements.

This leads to the issue of Winters’s use of silk, and especially the smooth touch of silk, as a metaphor for China’s diplomatic exercises on the BRI project. Given this book’s primary focus is on unpacking how various political actors imagine history and antiquities and weave them into a new regional order, analysis of the actual implementation of these cultural imaginaries, and the resulting frictions, is limited. For instance, most of China’s corridor projects (except the China-Pakistan and China-Indochina Peninsula Corridors) have failed to make substantial progress in practice. The creation of a new regional order, in other words, has not been a smooth-as-silk process. These critiques aside, Geocultural Power, by revealing the representational construction of the Silk Roads, ushers in a new era of research on heritage diplomacy.

References

Ashworth, G. J., Graham, B., & Tunbridge, J. E. (2015). Pluralising pasts: Heritage, identity and place in multicultural societies. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis MN, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Harrison, R. (2009). The politics of heritage. In R. Harrison (Ed.), Understanding the politics of heritage (pp. 154-196). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Meskell, L., Liuzza, C., Bertacchini, E., & Saccone, D. (2014). Multilateralism and UNESCO world heritage: Decision-making, States Parties and political processes. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21(5): 423-440.

Murray, S., Sharp, P., Wiseman, G., Criekemans, D., & Melissen, J. (2011). The present and future of diplomacy and diplomatic studies. International Studies Review, 13(4): 709-728.

Smith, L. (2006). Uses of heritage. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Wang, J. (2019). Relational heritage sovereignty: authorization, territorialization and the making of the Silk Roads. Territory, Politics, Governance, 7(2): 200-216.

Winter, T. (2019). Geocultural power: China’s quest to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.