1 - Introduction: Informal exchanges and contending connectivity along the shadow silk roads

Summary

Abstract

This volume offers a bottom-up view of transborder informal exchanges across Asia and Eurasia and analyses their contention with the stateorchestrated One Belt One Road initiative. We argue that informal connectivity has a distinct logic and set of rules in terms of its organization, operation, and transactions. It constitutes a third way of globalization, alongside market-driven neoliberalism and state-led regionalism. The three modes of globalization differ in terms of the nature of actors, types of activities, rules of exchange, roles of the state, and major risks involved. Their clash and mesh prompt us to rethink the agency of global expansion, the nature of world city networks, and the linkage to the global value chain.

Keywords: neoliberal globalization, state-led regionalization, low-end globalization, One Belt One Road, shadow silk roads, informal connectivity

Economic globalization has changed the historical geography of capitalism. Transnational networks now play a key role in global capitalist production, distribution, and accumulation. Such networks, created by various actors, represent new modes of coordination and governance. Complex webs of inter-statal, inter-urban, inter-firm, and inter-personal networks have been created, activated, and established to enable long-distance connectivity. They have become complementary but also competing socio-spatial projects that crisscross in multiple ways. The aim of this volume is to examine how such contending connectivity is articulated.

Currently, the highest profile politico-spatial project is the ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR) initiative put forward by the Chinese government, which seeks to re-define the historical geography of contemporary global capitalism. In just a few years, the OBOR initiative has developed into a grand strategy of transnational exchange, investment, and cooperation that stretches across more than 100 national borders from China to Asia, Eurasia, and Africa. It seeks to divert the flow of commodities, capital, and human labour away from the geo-economic centre of the United States in the Asia-Pacific towards a new historical geography that spreads across Eurasia, centring on China and its allies.

However, long before China launched the OBOR project, vast networks of cross-border exchanges had been established across Asia and Eurasia. These exchanges, in the form of trade and resource flows, are largely conducted beyond the control of states, and can thus be regarded as belonging to the realm of the shadow/informal economy.