One after another, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and eventually the United States became dominant maritime powers, protecting and expanding their trade interests in East Asia. Historically, at the time of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), China’s expanding trade with the West motivated the Islamic world to exert control over the trading routes of Central and West Asia, forcing Europe-under the pressure of a silver crisis caused by continuing trade deficits-to seek eastern trading routes that would allow it to bypass the Islamic regions. The OBOR strategy combines land power and maritime power, bolstering China’s existing oceanic hegemony in East Asia. The Chinese government has publicly stressed the lessons of the 1930s overcapacity crisis in the West that precipitated the Second World War, and promoted these new initiatives in the name of “peaceful development.” Nevertheless, the turn to OBOR suggests a regional scenario broadly similar to that in Europe between the end of the nineteenth century and the years before the First World War, when strong nations jostled one another for industrial and military dominance. 1 Along with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the OBOR policies represent an ambitious spatial expansion of Chinese state capitalism, driven by an excess of industrial production capacity, as well as by emerging financial capital interests. In late 2013, Chinese premier Xi Jinping announced a pair of new development and trade initiatives for China and the surrounding region: the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road,” together known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR). Translated from the Chinese by Alice Chan. MR thanks Zhihe Wang for his assistance in editing this article. This is the second of three articles by Sit Tsui and her coauthors offering a Chinese perspective on current issues in global political economy. All are founding members of the Global University for Sustainability. Wen Tiejun is director of the Rural Reconstruction Center at Renmin University, Beijing. Lau Kin Chi is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University. Erebus Wong is a senior researcher at the Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Program at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Sit Tsui is an associate professor at the Rural Reconstruction Institute at Southwest University, Chongqing.
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