16: CHINA, THE GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE RACE AND ITS URBAN IMPACTS - A panel with Jon Silver, Zhengli Huang and Linda Westman

In this feature, Tom and Beth discuss the Global Infrastructure Race with colleagues from the Urban Institute (UI), recorded live as part of the UI’s 10 year anniversary celebrations. Drawing on insights emerging from the GlobalCORRIDOR and Pluralize projects, Jon Silver, Zhengli Huang and Linda Westman share their interpretation of the Global Infrastructure Race, its urban impacts and how we can centre and decentre the role of China. Specifically they discuss:

• What is the Global Infrastructure Race and how can we understand its diverse geopolitical and economic manifestations?
• How can historical and contemporary analysis help unpack the role of China and Chinese investments?
• What are the impacts on cities and urban inequalities of these activities in and beyond China?             

Guests

Professor Jon Silver is an urban geographer interested in the uneven ways in which infrastructure is planned, operationalised and experienced, working across a range of cities in the global norths and south. He leads the GlobalCORRIDOR project.

Dr Zhengli Huang works on Chinese investment in infrastructure across Africa. She worked and lived in Kenya and her fieldwork experience extends to Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, and Mozambique. She works on GlobalCORRIDOR and Pluralize. 

Dr Linda Westman focusses on climate politics, urban transformation, and sustainability discourses, including the policy/governance aspects of low-carbon development in cities in China. She leads the Pluralize project. 

Read More 

The Material Geographies of the Belt and Road Initiative

Governing Climate Change in a Changing World 

Chinese Economic Zones in Africa

Funding

GlobalCORRIDOR (ID: 947779) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Pluralize was originally granted by the HORIZON Call: ERC-2022-STG and funded by UKRI (EP/Y00020X/1).

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_04 0:18

Hello, in this month's feature we ask: what exactly is the global infrastructure race? How can we understand its diverse economic and geopolitical manifestations?

SPEAKER_00 0:29

How can historical and contemporary analysis help us unpack the role of China and Chinese investment in this race to look behind the grand narratives and strategies?

SPEAKER_04 0:38

And what are the impacts of these activities on cities and urban inequalities in and beyond China? Welcome to Urban Radar, the podcast series which brings an urban lens to current affairs. I'm Tom Goodfellow, Professor of Urban Studies and International Development at the University of Sheffield.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

And I'm Beth Perry, Director of the Urban Institute and Professor of Urban Epistemics, also at the University of Sheffield. So we've got a special feature for everyone today, which we recorded live at the Urban Institute's 10-year anniversary celebrations a couple of weeks ago. This is a panel discussion between two of the Urban Institute flagship European Research Council projects. And I'm really excited actually because, you know, even when you run a research centre, you don't often get to put different projects in dialogue with each other. So I think this is quite a unique opportunity to look across two of our projects. So the first of those is a project called Global Corridor, led by John Silver, which is nearing completion. And this is a project that's been looking at the unequal impacts that corridor investments around the world are having on people living in cities and urban areas during rapid urbanization, focusing on the kinds of ways that infrastructural life is being played out, produced, operated, experienced, and navigated along these huge global infrastructure corridors. And there's a whole load of different things that the project team have been doing over the last few years, including looking at particular case study sites in the Mediterranean, in Northeast Africa and in South Asia, and really looking at the experiences of everyday life. And there's going to be some exciting outputs coming out of that project very soon, actually, which we'll pick up a bit at the end. Then we also have the Pluralize project represented in this panel, which is one of our newer European Research Council projects and is just starting fieldwork. Actually, we have a couple of our researchers landed in China overnight to start their fieldwork. And Pluralize is a five-year project. This one's looking at a historical perspective on just transitions in urban China, bringing that up to date with contemporary policy and for understanding foreign investment flows to look at just transitions in and beyond China. And that's also sort of focusing on how we think about Chinese philosophy and philosophical traditions, how we think about the role of local government approaches and ecological civilization, but also picking up this similar thread to the Global Corridor Project around how Chinese investment projects shape just transitions in cities in and beyond China's borders.

SPEAKER_04 3:08

And this feature was recorded after two keynote lectures that happened earlier on in the 10th anniversary celebrations. We refer to these in the discussion. The first of those keynotes was by Abdomilik Simone, who people of course will know in part maybe from our earlier feature and is an emeritus professor here at the Urban Institute. And his his focused on this idea of urban inhabitation, picking up some of the themes also discussed on the podcast. And then the second was Simon Marvin's talk on beyond splintering urbanism and what splintering of infrastructure means for cities, which obviously builds on his earlier work as co-author of the book Splintering Urbanism with Stephen Graham. But also refers to some of the themes that he spoke about on our feature in relation to Neurotech and the way in which infrastructures, technical infrastructures, have come to permeate humans and as well as cities and urban environments in different ways. So, following those two features by senior professors here at the Urban Institute, we then went into this feature about the global infrastructure race. I won't say too much now about what we mean by the global infrastructure race, as it begins with quite a long discussion of that. But the other thing that this really focuses on, this discussion, is the role of China within that race. The aim being to center China, to understand why China is so significant in this global infrastructure race, but also with more of a critical perspective so that we don't focus too much on China, given there's much more complex things going on.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

It's interesting because neither of these projects were explicitly about positioning the Urban Institute as having particular expertise on China, but it's impossible to understand the global infrastructure race and how these things land locally without looking at China, as you say. And of course, you were chairing this live, weren't you, Tom? Partly because it also links to some of the work that you've done, both individually and with Zheng Li.

SPEAKER_04 4:52

Yeah, absolutely. So Zheng Li and I had a project where we were looking at this was an ESRC funded project that ran from about 2016, 17 through 2019. And we were looking, 2020 perhaps, we were looking at the role of Chin the Chinese urban development model, really, in African cities. And how both through Chinese finance and Chinese expertise and Chinese businesses, you were seeing this influence of a Chinese kind of form of urbanization. And we looked particularly at um big transport megaprojects and at industrial parks in Ethiopia and Uganda. But it also connects to s some of the thinking I was doing around that time around this idea of the infrastructure gap in Africa and how that was being talked about by big financial institutions as this huge infrastructure gap that in reality was an opportunity for global finance to make a profit. There's a piece I wrote as a self-plug here in 2020 in the review of African Political Economy that was kind of looking at this, and it speaks to the themes of this discussion in the sense that I make this kind of point that rather than talking about the financialization of everything, we actually saw global finance becoming kind of infrastructuralized, becoming more and more attracted to infrastructure, while domestic finance by domestic actors and wealthy elites was going more into real estate rather than infrastructure. But of course, the opportunity to profit from real estate and property is connected to the infrastructure that comes in raising the land values. And this is something that Jenly refers to as well when talking about the Chinese urban development model.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

And I think it was really good that you were sharing that because, of course, we have this theme that runs through the feature around centering and decentering China, as you said. And of course, your work has been in Africa and East Africa in particular. But through the discussion that we're going to hear, you have this sort of like a pendulum that swings between sort of centering China and thinking about the impacts that are happening elsewhere and then looking at what's happening elsewhere and how local elites and states are creating the conditions in which that investment can land. So just to give a brief outline of the feature before we crack on, we're going to start with a bit of an extended introduction from John about the global infrastructure race, the role of China, but also many other players, both states, private enterprises, and other actors, before we bring in Zheng Li and Linda to challenge the idea that there is this kind of grand narrative or strategy that's being implemented by China and to address this question that you flag in your intro in the feature about whether we risk essentialising or orientalizing China when we don't understand the complexity of all of these other kinds of actors involved.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

Yeah, and then we're gonna end, in a way, by looking more about the impacts domestically of China's urbanization programs and its approach to urban development and how that's also shaped, been shaped by and intersected with environmental politics, and how environmental politics and environmental policy is kind of used by China as part of a global and domestic kind of authoritarian model in a sense. And then to end, we reflect really on how the grounded research, particularly from the Global Corridor Project, reveals the impacts of the global infrastructure race on those living in the shadows of an investment and infrastructure projects in urban areas, especially.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

So we'd better quickly introduce our guests. So first we've got Professor John Silver, who's an urban geographer interested in the uneven ways in which infrastructure is planned, operationalized, and experienced. He's worked in a range of cities across the global norths and souths and focused on sort of how do we, from a post-colonial perspective, theorize these networks and pay particular attention to how big global discourses, finance, politics really come to ground in particular places. And he's also part of a team examining how agglomeration economics have shaped the transformation of UK cities in recent years. And some of our most avid listeners and fans will remember that in episode two we talked about Manchester's development model with Adam Lever and Rich Golding, and they're part of the same team with John. And so you've got this kind of really interesting intersection between the big global corridor project and a very specific project looking at how that is landing in Manchester.

SPEAKER_04 8:50

And we've also got uh Dr. Zheng Li Huang, who is a research associate here at the Urban Institute. She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning here. Um, and then also as an Urban Studies Foundation international fellow here in the same department. Her research focuses on Chinese investment and infrastructure across Africa. She's worked and lived in Kenya for a long time, and her fieldwork experience extends to Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, and Mozambique.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

And so last but not least, we have Dr. Linda Westman on the panel, who is the project lead of another of our major projects, Pluralize. And she has a really long track record in looking at climate politics, urban transformation and sustainability discourses. And actually, prior to being an academic, Linda was employed as a senior analyst in the science and innovation office of the Embassy of Sweden in Beijing, spending nearly a decade studying and working in China after completing her master's degree, and very impressively actually did her quantitative and qualitative research in Mandarin to enable her to work in Beijing and Shandong Province around the policy and governance aspects of low carbon development in cities in China. And since then has also contributed to some of the big global discourses on climate change and climate assessment that we were talking about with Vanessa Castanbroto and David Dobman in episode one. So we're really uh closing a loop here. Right, we'd better go to the feature. Just a quick reminder that it was live recorded. There's a bit of background noise, some cups and brownies being cleared away in the background. So I'm sorry if you get hungry. Um as usual, we will come back to reflect on some of the themes that come through the feature at the end.

SPEAKER_04 10:35

So, with this panel, we're staying broadly on the theme of infrastructure, which between Simon and I was talking about earlier, but really looking at quite a different scale and quite different processes. So while the earlier keynote discussion was kind of about the fragmentation of infrastructure, um, and infrastructure kind of um knows even within the home and domestic space, we're kind of now looking at this idea of the global infrastructure rates. Because in addition to all of those dynamics that Simon was talking about, we also know that billions of dollars of investment are flowing into global infrastructure projects across the planet, and these are having really profound effects on cities and regions with very different, very diverse, very unpredictable effects on urban dwellers in different places. So a lot of the discussion about this, um, and we will be focusing to some extent on this today, has been about China, uh, the role of China as a leading force in this global infrastructure race, including through the Belt and Road Initiative. And it's very interesting to be reflecting on the projects here because of how much the world has actually changed in the last few years, including since the project started, because while China remains an extremely important actor, um it also feels increasingly problematic to just center China in the discussion. So that's why, in the title, you've seen we're centering and decentering China. We're going to be exploring and interrogating the role of China in this infrastructure race, but also thinking about how the focus on this single country could be problematic. Uh, it could essentialize and orientalise China on the one hand, but also miss some other things that are happening or some of the broader processes we need to be concerned with, and importantly, how those land in cities in different parts of the world. So I'm going to begin by turning to John, who's leading this global urban corridor project funded by the European Research Council, to ask what exactly is this global infrastructure race? What's happening? Who's involved? How might you characterize this idea of an infrastructure race?

SPEAKER_05 12:36

Thanks, Tom. Roll-up, roll-up, it's the great global infrastructure race. So since 2008 economic crisis, I think one of the things we've seen in the global economy is a massive surge of finance and capital into all different kinds of global infrastructure. So here I'm talking about connectivity infrastructures, highways, ports, um, train lines, as well as manufacturing nodes such as special economic zones, um, real estate enclaves along real estate frontiers. And we're seeing all kinds of investors, speculators, agencies, national, regional bodies, and just about every other authority involved in this race. In the Global Corridor Project, we've been particularly interested in how these individual global infrastructure projects become bundled together in transnational and multimodal initiatives that we call corridors. And we've documented at least 70 of these infrastructure corridors across the planet, with many more within national jurisdictions, and each month seems to be more and more being proposed. And I think it's quite clear that the logics of the global infrastructure race, as seen from the perspective of the corridor, encompasses a clear focus on national and regional economic development. And I think this is important because this is investment that seems to be going in instead of social programmes such as education and health and the development paradigm of the 90s and 2000s. And I'm increasingly convinced that in the 2020s, the state is attempting to derive its authority and legitimacy through its capacity to deliver these mega projects at speed and scale, and as a catch-all solution to issues of poverty, economic stagnation, austerity, growth demands, and other kinds of government imperatives. So this is perhaps also a noticeable shift by states from Egypt to Greece, from the UK to Kenya, away from the role of the state as a redistributive mechanism around social welfare towards demonstrations of enhancing logistical connectivity and manufacturing capacities through this global infrastructure. Why is it a race? Well, not every port can be the primary export node for a region, not every special economic zone can attract high-value production, not every high-speed railway line can secure funding or become the main cargo route, given this kind of dense, often overlapping and sometimes competitive projection of different schemes. And there's all kinds of financial risks at play here. Loans go wrong, contracts don't come to fruition, the wrong kind of technical expertise or standards are deployed. There's a failure to stimulate the economic goals such as advanced manufacturing or export-driven economies, labour disputes, all kinds of different kinds of financial pressures brought onto already weak fiscal states, the disposal of public assets at future detriment to society. So the race is a race in the sense that there's those that are going to win and benefit financially, and there's others who are left with the burden of the economic cost falling on their shoulders. So, as well as this kind of economic reading, there's a more geopolitical reading at play here with the race. All kinds of global factors are determining how global infrastructure projects are being planned and constructed under the conditions of this race, the competing visions of logistical, territorial futures that are often playing out with multiple geoeconomic and geopolitical actors, diplomatic games about who owns which poor mine or railway, the connections to militarization, imperialism, and securitization by all different kinds of powers. So perhaps we should start with China or what CK Lee's called the specter of global China. This is important given the ways in which scholars attribute the kind of acceleration of this global infrastructure race as finding its genesis in the surge of investment that spilled out through the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI, initially through its six key corridors, but now encompassing dozens of national territories, the polar regions, and even outer space. So the China Pakistan Economic Corridor is a really good example of how this BRI is spilled out. China and Pakistan, seen as the oldest of friends in the region, shaped a high-level diplomatic attempt from 2015 onwards to create the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Agreement was signed in 2015 for 51 projects with a total value of 46 billion, which really signals Pakistan's kind of attempt to reposition itself within South Asia and the broader global economy. And here we see all kinds of projects from the new port at Guada, which is positioned as uh the new Dubai, through to the widening of the Carakam Highway back across to China, um, new kinds of power and energy generation facilities, and then following on from that a kind of manufacturing and real estate developments. So CPET's a strategic hedge for China. It gives it access to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf for Pakistan. It allows its powerful friend China to become more deeply integrated in the economy. And I think this integration of China into national economies is being witnessed all over the planet in different kinds of regions. So we can look to the work of Francesca Governor in the Adriatic, a very different region than Pakistan, and draw a kind of clear and sharp findings that Chinese finance into these global infrastructure projects is increasingly integrating and attempting to transform these logistical territories. This hasn't, of course, come without response, particularly from the global hegemon. The US is framed by some scholars, such as DiKalo and Shinlo, within the logics of a rising Second Cold War and attempts at claiming a network centrality over these logistical and technical networks, in which the global infrastructure project acts to bring together both territorial and economic advantages. So this Second Cold War is spilling out in lots of different places. We can think about the libido corridor and the US investment, first under Biden, but surprisingly continuing under Trump, in which US interests in securing secure rare earth materials in the Zambian Copper Belt and the southern parts of the DRC is a direct kind of infrastructural response to a long-standing Tazara Chinese funded operated railway in Zambia. Another example might be the Indian Middle East Economic Corridor, IMEC, designed to challenge the primacy of the BRI and find new connections between Europe and South Asia and the Middle East. And again, with attempts to reshape the regional architecture of the Middle East even more toward US control and concurrently normalization with Israel. So these corridors are geopolitical, they are being various forms of competition, and they serve various kinds of geopolitical purposes. Alongside Yanis and Seth, we've been looking at how the logistical territories of Greece have become an intense site of competition, most notably out of the Chinese Costco takeover of the Perez port and US responses to that, but with other kinds of actors involved as well. So Russia and the EU figure prominently in that territorial restructuring. There are, and I'm going to list a few, all kinds of supranational actors busy solidifying their own visions of the economic circuits of the planet. For instance, the European Union over the last 20 years has been busy with its own network, 10T, but increasingly is looking further afield and expanding beyond Europe. So the still proposed transmigrant multimodal corridor uses the same logics as the 10T in Europe, but extends it across the Mediterranean. Partnerships that coalesce around corridor plans, create new kinds of authorities and bodies. So we can see the Central Asian CAREC initiative that's moved through various phases, both economically, infrastructurally, but also politically. So it's moved from a kind of post-Soviet focus on integration into the economic orbit of Europe through EU reconstruction funding. So more recent investments now spilling from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that aims to boost Central Asia as a critical crossroads in global trade, but also bind it more towards China. We have the rising power of Gulf states such as Saudi and the UAE. I was recently in Egypt with colleagues at the American University in Cairo, not long after Abu Dhabi had concluded a $35 billion land deal with the Egyptian government along the Mediterranean coast. So in many contexts, we see how the Gulf is a major investor in global infrastructure projects, along with expected geopolitical influence. And the work of scholars such as Adun Hania and others at Exeter University are really useful and give a convincing case that this global infrastructure race shouldn't just be seen as either Chinese or a kind of Second Cold War between China and the US. I think it's also worth talking a little about newly assertive majority world states, thinking about a lot of countries in Africa that have been punished through decades of structural adjustment, finding new fiscal resources and capacity through new flows of national finance, increased tax bases, and new forms of multilateral assistance, such as the African Development Bank. And I think this is really interesting to think about this moment in which countries such as Uganda, where I've been working, have the capacity to invest from a growing tax base and this access to new forms of finance to follow what Miguel and others have called a kind of infrastructure-led development model that necessitates this real focus and function on global infrastructure. The reverse is true in much of the minority world with years of austerity in places such as the UK and Greece, meaning that the role of national governments here is not to mobilize national funds, but increasingly as an enabler for finance from places like China or the Gulf to facilitate investment and to try and reconfigure these austerity-hit national states to keep up in the global infrastructure race. Finally, I just want to talk about the range of financial actors that are involved in the race, thinking about private equity, pensions, sovereign wealth firms, high wealth individuals. They're increasingly drawn to the sector of global infrastructure as a stable and long-term asset. You can pick up the Financial Times and see all kinds of figures being mooted. I think this morning I checked, apparently, the global infrastructure market is worth 3 trillion over the next three years, but it could be 10 trillion over three years. No one really knows, but what we do see is how these finance actors have increasingly seen the financialization of infrastructure and control moving from nation states to these actors. So this is a dizzying set of geoeconomic and geopolitical processes unfolding in and around the organizing logic of global infrastructure. But also, that's why I think we should call it a race because there's so many different kinds of objectives, aims, motivations at work in what's going on.

SPEAKER_04 26:06

Fantastic. Thank you, John. I'm just going to hand over to Linda now for some more. Yeah, you can use that.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

Just a quick comment on these narratives on global China and the rise of China and becoming increasingly popular because of this global infrastructure race. I would suggest that they are permeated by an imaginary of China as a kind of other, which in turn is something that builds on a long tradition of orientalizing thought. A way of portraying China as a kind of alternative to Western society, something that is implicit in ideas like thought traditions of the West, uh West and East, actually. But in contemporary use, we also see it quite often as in in references to China as a kind of alternative source of geopolitical power. Something that we originally saw in international relations theory, but now in a much broader scholarship and even in the news. I would suggest that these are narratives that tend to produce very stereotypical and dichotomic representations of China. They're fixed in ideas of China as some kind of mirror image, or even just simply as a threat to the West. It is not something that allows us to understand a particular anything about China, not politics within China, not how various groups are mobilizing interests in relation to specific stakeholders or against them or anything like that. And I think that that is also specifically something that we want to continue to unpack, well, through our research, but also through this conversation.

SPEAKER_04 27:31

I'm going to turn now to Zheng Li. So Zheng Li and I have actually worked together as well on a project looking at some of these things in Uganda again and in Ethiopia around urban infrastructure projects. And Zheng Li has done a lot of very interesting work recently also in in Kenya. So based on these and and your other experiences, if you could tell us a bit more about how we can unpack this idea of Chinese infrastructure investment and what are the drivers behind it at these different levels.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Thank you, Tom. I want to start by saying that it's actually very important to break down the idea of the grand strategy or terms like global China into different stakeholders. It's important because the thoughts of or the narratives of grand strategies, well, they're helpful in explaining some of the things, for example, the surge of infrastructure finance into developing regions like Africa from China since the 2008 and financial crisis, but it doesn't really explain other things. For example, there's actually a lack of cohesive action plan, for example, to build connected networks of infrastructure in certain regions by Chinese stakeholders. It doesn't also explain, for example, the fierce competition among Chinese companies in these infrastructure construction sectors in Africa. So when we start to unpack, the stakeholders will see that it's actually not a monolithic thing. It's made up of a myriad of different stakeholders. And first and foremost is the state-owned enterprises as contractors. Now, these are big-scale construction companies that is technically owned by the state, but they are very diverse in the sense that they are hundreds in number in the domestic market in China. And in each of the countries that I visited, including Kenya, in Ethiopia, there are at least 60 or 70 companies competing for similar projects across the country. You can imagine how diverse and how confusing that it looks from outside that these are, not to mention these companies are with very confusing names on the call.

SPEAKER_04 29:42

Lots of scenes.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Number 13. Number 13 and number 17. They're actually very different companies with very different managerial styles and investment styles and scales of investment. And then behind these or beyond those state-owned enterprises, there are also the powerful policy banks from China, including the Exxon Bank and the China Development Bank, who are arguably behind some of the major huge infrastructure projects in Africa and across the globe. But we have to also understand that these banks are unlike the multilateral financial institutes or a lot of Exxon banks from OECD countries, they don't have local branches. At maximum, they have probably a original representative office with two or three staff. So they don't actually take part in the daily operation of the infrastructure projects or decision making of these infrastructure projects that they invest in. So the information that they got are from the people from mostly from the local partners and also the state-owned enterprises who are building these projects. So between the SOEs and the policy banks, there's a very interesting interplay. This is a very um unique feature of uh what we call global China today. The interests or the speculative actions of these SOEs are driving the development of some of the biggest infrastructure projects in Africa. And they would then uh, you know, aiming at certain projects, they would start to bring the finance back up on board, which means that they would bring later on, they would bring the Exxon Bank and the state banks on board in negotiation with uh the hosting countries to uh facilitate the realization of such projects. So basically what we are seeing, and this is how this has been a common pattern in China finance the huge infrastructure projects in Africa, is that there's um commercial interests or speculative actions by these state-owned enterprises are driving the implementation of such projects. So it's actually not a grand strategy, it's driven by commercial interests. Um, and beyond this interplay between the state um actors, there are also a myriad of private enterprises, just uh as the one who is managing the industrial park in uh Bali, for example, as John just mentioned. And these are much smaller in scale, but much more in number, in quantity. So they're very hard, much harder to predict what kind of investment um that they're interested in. And last but not the least, it's very important to note uh the contextual background in which these infrastructure projects are being implemented. It is precisely the states in Africa, and sometimes most cases, the elites that are that have planned these infrastructure projects that paved the ground for uh or attracted the Chinese investment into these projects. And for example, uh the Kenyan State Gauge Railway, Standard Gauge Railway, which is part of the Northern Corridors John just mentioned. Um, it's the it's first uh planned by uh African planners, East African planners in one of the summits in East Africa at the beginning of the century. And it was the Kenyan politician who approached the Chinese company, which is in this case China Road and Bridge. Uh the they started the negotiation. They wanted to engage the Chinese company to start the project as a PPP. And it was the Chinese company who had the idea of bringing in the Exxon Bank on board in this project that kickstart the project negotiation or and the signing of the bilateral agreement between the two states in 2010, which predates the coining of the term BRI, which took place in the tour, I think President Xi Jinping went into uh Kazakhstan and coined the term uh Belt and World Initiative in 2014. So it actually, if you read today about Standard Gauge Railway from Kenya, it's frequently used as a flagship project of BRI, but actually it was the speculative actions of these stakeholders that predates the grand narrative.

SPEAKER_04 34:16

Okay, thank you. That's not a really uh useful and interesting historical background. Um, I just want to ask you though, because this kind of landscape of actors you're talking about, state-owned enterprise areas, these development banks, some private companies, um presumably that's that's what's happening with many other countries as well, who are operating in places like Africa or around the world, investing overseas. Um as you say, people often think it's all about this grand plan and it's all about state-owned companies. And we we we know almost all the industrial parts we looked at were run by these private business people who were just looking for a new opportunity. So how is it different? How is what these Chinese actors do different from what other global actors might be doing, if at all?

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Yeah, I agree. I I think from that sense, if you look from uh capitalism point of view per se, I don't think Chinese investment is very different from any other variety of capitals. Um I guess uh unless you start to unpack global China from within, you start to realize that what's unique about Chinese investment is this very unique dynamic between the stakeholders that's owned by the state and the market or the diverse private or semi-private, semi-state stakeholders. So it is precisely this dynamic relations between the state and the market, and sometimes it's termed as state capital nexus or state firm nexus that determines that the Chinese investment will take very different forms under different contexts. For example, I think it will take very different forms in uh the context of uh the global north in comparison to uh Africa, which reminds me of what uh something that John has done recently on Manchester.

SPEAKER_05 36:04

Yeah, I mean the question if Chinese capital goes global, how and how is it able to land is really important. And in work with Adam and Rich on the Central Petal project, we've asked that question in the global north in Manchester. And I think there's two areas of analysis that we've proceeded through. First, how and in what form, whether developer, financer, intermediary, constructor, does global China go global in these western urban spaces? And then, second, what are the local conditions that generally talk about that facilitate the landing of this state capital? Right? It's not some force that just lands without there being a lot of work. So you can look at a city like Manchester, where there is the promise of billions of uh Chinese investment over the last decade, a lot of that is boosterists and doesn't actually come forward if you if you do the analysis. But what we did find was a multiple uh set of different actors, investment sites, and perhaps most interestingly, partnerships and organisational forms and fixes that enable the landing of this Chinese capital. And I think focusing on the partnership or the organizational form or fix is really interesting. So you can see in the airport city deal how two parties involved, one is the airport group, itself made up of local municipalities, the local state and an Australian uh private asset manager firm, IFM, with a state-owned enterprise Bayesian construction engineering group. So this has had to take on a very particular organizational form and fix within the UK context of financing of kind of project management and project development. And although this was um heralded as a £1 billion deal, there's not really been much work there. There's been a few hotels and half a business park, sorry, and a bridge. Um but what BCGI was able to do was establish itself through this partnership. It gave it the legitimacy to strike deals with other municipalities, Bolton and Wigan, um, in the region to develop surrounding sites in these surrounding uh municipalities. And this kind of increased its local legitimacy, it enhanced its operations, and now what you find is BCG operates on a kind of purely commercial logic of um construction tenders and winning them. So the form of BCGI changes over time in Manchester. There's another partnership between the local state and a high wealth um Hong Kong real estate family is encompassing 15,000 new homes. It's supposed to be one of the new towns that the government have been celebrating in the last week or two. Um, and I often ask the question: how did a uh a wealthy Hong Kong family, previously known for high-end condos, casinos, and car parks in Hong Kong and Australia, acquire a deal that is going to give them tens of millions at public land transfers and different kinds of preparation by the local state to allow that capital to land. I mean, there's all kinds of different organizational forms and fixes. You have more silent capital from China, the just finances, ongoing urban development. Um Middlewood Locks is a really good example. You also have what we call the petier, so small-scale middle class families in Hong Kong and somewhat in China, buying one or two houses or housing units in Manchester. Um, and and that's thousands of units per year. So, what is global China at this point and how do we make sense of it? And I think focusing on the forms and the partnerships is really important. We find these are highly variegated modes of operation for global China to proceed. It highlights the role of the local or, as you've mentioned, the national state in the making of investable terrains for Chinese finance, and this spans a whole host of different kinds of de-risking strategies, which I think you could talk about more, right, given your work there.

SPEAKER_04 40:39

Um yeah, I I do want to turn back to you, Jenni, and I also want to, because I think this is an important question to reflect on. Um how how we've got a sense of global China now, and in a minute we'll talk a little bit about the changing investment priorities of the government globally. But how do we think about the fact that this communist, um, relatively poor, kind of autarkic country that was mainly concerned that it's only industrialization just a few decades ago is now in a position to be this major provider of housing in Manchester among other parts of the world? You know, can you give us a little bit briefly of that historical background that allowed this to happen?

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Yeah, thank you, Tom. I think it's um very critical that we trace this phenomenon of um global China back for decades. And I think this is in relation to what we were just talking about, the differences between the global south, what they are doing in the global south and global north. For example, the Kenyan SGR, again, uh using this as an example, there's an underlying assumption that this is going to be a developmental project because there's an underlying uh logic of using urbanization as a boost of the economy. And this thought is deeply rooted. I want to trace back um 30 years, at least in the middle of 1990s, the financial reform which paved the way for an urban economic model that was dominant in China in the past 30 years. So, what happened in the 1990s was uh a financial reform which basically redistributed revenue income between the central government and the local government. What was born at the same time was the policy banks, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, Exxon Bank and China Development Banks. Um then out of that, what happened was a loop was generated between the central financial institutions and the local state, represented by something that we call local financial platform, um, which the local government is using the land as a collateral to borrow money from the central banks in order to boost the economy into the infrastructure sector to draw private investors into new uh areas, especially at the fringe of urban areas. Now, this logic uh is built on a booming economy based on real estate, basically. And this since the 1990s has replaced the industrialization to become the territorial logic of accumulation of wealth in China, and it lasted for at least 30 years. And so, what we are seeing today um the investment by these policy banks and construction sector boom that um benefited from this 30 years of non-stop economic growth in China, that they uh basically were going outward, and it was basically an externalization of this um what we term as urban statecraft by China, which is using urbanization as a territorial logic to uh boost the accumulation of capital in China. And this is um very important because now we're seeing uh a shift in trend because uh partly because the the money in the central banks are drying out, but also because now we're seeing as the economic downturn is taking place in China, we're seeing that this bubble is collapsing basically. So we're looking, I think it There's a dire need of developing an alternatives of economic um uh growth in China and also outward uh finance. So what we are seeing in Africa, going back to Africa, we're what we are seeing is that uh there's uh uh the SOEs, for example, they're shifting from using the loans as a financial backup to more um becoming a private partner, uh, as exemplified, for example, in uh Nairobi Expressway, the same contractor who built the uh standard gauge railway actually became a financial partner of the expressway. So these are the things that we're seeing more and more today.

SPEAKER_04 44:38

Okay, all right, that's really helpful. So we have this sense in which the kind of Chinese form of urban stagcraft has an urbanization-driven economy, has in a sense been exported with actors going out and basically using urbanization elsewhere as a form of uh development and profit making. But we also see this hugely changing global landscape, including you know the financial crisis and its effects and a downturn in the Chinese economy relatively. But there's also changing policy priorities globally. So, how have these things led to shifts just in the last decade or so about what the Chinese government and other actors seek to do with their investments? Linda.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

Yeah, thanks. Um I'm gonna backtrack first and continue to build on what Jen Lee was saying because we're academics and we were obstacles tracing backwards before, but then to answer your actual question. So, yeah, to continue on what Jen Li was saying about this logic of pursuing economic growth through capital accumulation in urban areas, this is something that we can trace even further back in China's history to the very, very earliest days of the communist regime when the appropriation of land by the state enabled a kind of low-cost investment into industrial expansion, primarily in those days, which contributed to the economic development that was so essential at that time, and that has then contributed over the past decades and formalized into a model that has continued to spur economic growth, as Jamili was saying. And if we look uh at the decades following the opening up and reform programs that were adopted at the end of the 1970s, China has witnessed among the most rapid and large-scale processes of urbanization that any country has ever seen. And again, as Jomie explained, this urbanization has become intermingled with economic development in a way that is now inseparable in many ways from this like so-called growth miracle that China has achieved, uh, and that the party itself likes to describe as lifting millions out of poverty and a success story in all of this. So it is understandable that urbanization actually has become an economic development objective in and of itself. It has been integrated into the five-year plans, which are the documents that formulate the development visions of the country. Since the 11th five-year plan, urbanization was explicitly adopted as a strategic objective to realize economic growth. So completely embedded into the growth model and often narrated as a success story, even a template of success. So we have that on the one hand, but then what we have on the other hand is that of course this tremendous process of socioeconomic and ecological transformation has created massive challenges as well, of course. And the most evident one would be the ever-growing divides between the more urbanized and the less urbanized parts of China, which are most evident if we look at the western and the eastern regions. And of course, then also all of the development challenges that urbanization has been causing in all the other parts of the world, like uh continued demand on natural resources, air pollution, these kind of things, which become much more vast when the cities are much more vast, as they are in China. So, to return back to your question, what we have seen in the more recent decades is a shift to something that the political leadership likes to call new urbanization, which places the emphasis on the quality rather than the quantity, let's say the speed or the scale of urbanization. And we're also seeing the uptake of a long list of buzzwords that we're now familiar with from urban sustainability discourse everywhere, basically, like smart and integrated and people-centered and resource-efficient forms of development. So narratives of environmental protection are kind of creeping into these narratives or discourses or practices of both urban planning and economic planning. Um, and to return back again to your question, we are also seeing that this is creating a new form of investment imperative. It includes support of tactical industries like new materials and batteries and the green and the blue economy and circularity and things like that. And also, of course, uh massive amounts of funding that is channeled towards new kinds of infrastructure systems and also technologies like transport systems or waste management or uh smart and digital platform in the Simon and Warby sort of way. Uh renewable energy, of course, also with China now being the largest producer and consumer of renewable energy on a global level. Um it has also become tactical for China to frame this as part of some sort of impressive climate change strategy, which at the same time uh allows Xi Jinping to brand itself as the hero of the global savior of the climate change uh problem. Um, leadership in electronic vehicles is a very good example of this, where China is now as global leader both in production and sales, is creating all kinds of tactical markets, feeding seamlessly into these narratives of China's hero and a global responsible superpower. While at the same time, if we look at how this is actually playing out in China, yes, we see that there's an uptake of new infrastructure and technologies, but with EVs that are actually being powered by coal plants. So a lot more ambiguous about the real climate mitigation happening there.

SPEAKER_04 49:52

Um on that point about environmental damage of some of the Chinese projects overseas. I know you've been doing work on the mining sector and looking at this in various African countries, including the Congo. I'm not sure if either of you want to say a bit more about that.

SPEAKER_02 50:06

I will say a bit more about how the environmental governance logic is or is not traveling, and we can leave to Jung Yi if we've actually not started to do research on that yet. We've just done the uh preliminary assessment of an assessment of the database, but let's see if you want to say anything about that. But overall, I think it is very tempting to assume that the environmental governance models in China may be traveling elsewhere, and like with the growth of soft power and things like that. And this is something that is also documented and debated in the scholarship on the diffusion of environmental authoritarianism and things like this. I would say that we have to be very, very cautious about this because no country, including or even maybe especially China, is able to export its states, single party states somewhere else. And I think this is what Germany's idea about the externalization of state crop was showing so effectively how certain relationships, of course, can travel somewhere else, certain investment rationales, but never full-fledged export of all the complex relationships that make up a state. Um, what we do have is single, what research on single cases where we can often find things like limited amounts of transparency or limited amount of involvement of local stakeholders, which is hinting towards a corporate culture that is different from what we're now accustomed to in terms of international products. And that, of course, can also inspire debates about what will the future of the international regimes be, given that they are in fact fixed in liberal democratic norms that don't necessarily match the many political traditions in China, but this is an open question. Um China the Chinese leadership also, of course, wants to brand its foreign investment projects as green, and there's even a green vision for the BRI. But if we look into where the majority of state funding is actually going, it continues to be directed towards conventional energy projects. Uh, the analysis that Jim Lee has been doing in the Pluralized Project looks at the A data database, which is basically documenting bilateral funding in the form of loans and grants. And here we can see that the largest amount of funding is being directed to countries with significant fossil fuel resources. Angola at the top of the base, Venezuela, Central Asia, even Russia. So coal, oil, and gas are the continue to be the target sectors. And even though it might not be that the investment is going towards the actual extraction of fossil fuel resources, that's actually usually not the case. Uh, it is directed towards the surrounding infrastructure, so transmission grids, pipelines, and exactly like John and Jambi have been saying, into the ports, the railroads, the the roads that produce connectivity with this. Um we can look forward to some amazing rhetorical moves from the uh Chinese leadership to still promote these as green, like tactics like clean coal or super extra thermal, uh efficient thermal plants, this kind of thing, which we're accustomed with from within China. To be fair, other governments do that too. I think we can question how green anything is in the context of an extractivist global capitalist economy. But yes.

SPEAKER_04 53:16

So how do we understand? I mean, this is another big question, but the impacts on cities particularly, as most of us here are interested in cities and urban areas. Um, what are the impacts on cities of these huge investments and how they land on the ground in the parts of the world where you're doing research?

SPEAKER_05 53:33

Great, I'll take that. I mean, I think firstly, without opening uh a kind of worms, I'd it's worth thinking more about the urban rather than cities per se in relation to these global infrastructure projects, given that they just encompass such massive territories and indeed reconfigure how we think about the city and the urban region. I still think we're looking for the right vocabulary to describe and analyse the ways in which global infrastructure touches down in urban space. Uh, they don't seem to fully correspond with some of the concepts currently at our disposal, even whilst they all offer certain inroads into thinking about urban conditions under these kinds of logics, um, or what the team in Sheffield um have called corridorization as a kind of logic of reshaping and transforming urban spaces. I mean, this task is inherently um comparative and built through dialogue, um, extending in lots of different kinds of ways given the scale and the speed of these transformations. So I'm gonna focus the answer to the question, I think, less on urban governance and more at this stage on thinking through everyday lives and the ways in which these massive projects cause all kinds of different um upheavals. And these are injustices that are often invisibilized by the state under the promises of future economic development, shared prosperity through infrastructure investment. And I think we need to really foreground the ways in which cities become the sites of many different kinds of global infrastructure project roller, um, but also small towns, um villages, places a lot along the way in hinterlands and those less studied places. So let's think about a large global infrastructure project hitting uh a tower, a city, is households and communities on the sharp end of these transformations that might be a particularly interesting side to look at. So, in the Global Corridor project, we've been working with the Karat Shibbin Lab. Um, Tawheed Mohammed has been leading research, which will be um here's a plug featured in a forthcoming report we'll be releasing, trying to model um through GIS means potential displacements along the rehabilitated mainline Wall Railway. So this is the national railway through Pakistan, um uh $6.8 billion uh but could be more. Partnership deal has been arranged with uh EXIM Bank in China. Um, and the promise is to increase the acceleration of logistics, goods, cargo from northern Pakistan and into China um through speed and capacity. So this is great. This is great for the Pakistan national economy, this is great for its kind of placing within logistical competition. But when you get down to the ground of cities such as Karachi in Lahore, you realise that the rehabilitation of the railway involves massive displacement. And what Sohid has done is take two distances that might be used for expanding the railway 25 metres and 40 metres and gone and modelled the whole railway route, gone on the ground, uh, and and kind of modelled what kind of numbers are going to be displaced if this railway project goes ahead. And there's some very interesting differentiation in affected households between 25 metre standard and a 40-metre standard, tens of thousands of households different. So, this is what happens when a global infrastructure project rolls out on the ground, uh, when it rolls out and lands and materializes in the city. In work with the British Institute of East Africa, Warum Mugathimi, focuses on the expulsion of 40,000 people along the Nairobi Expressway, particularly focused in the neighbourhood of Makouro. Again, this is a Chinese financed um toll road with a Chinese private operator. The question is: does China matter here? Is it something more than a financer or a funder? But if you go to Makuro, even years later, you can kind of see the devastation. It almost looks like the bomb went off in some places. And I I use that kind of term because I think that a lot of these projects are world-shattering for many communities. You can see the kind of ways in which whole lives disappear beneath project logics. So I've termed this kind of lived experience of global infrastructure as a corridor urbanism, drawing attention to injustice, struggle, contestation at the urban scale, but also kind of building on the work of Malik, thinking more about some of the mundane inhabitations along these spaces that can never really be reduced to the capitalist logics which they seek. So here people open up livelihoods, might be uh repairing long-distance lorries at a village stock, opportunities, new kinds of urban relations that are often stretched. And I think this also requires more attention when we think about how global infrastructure projects land in cities. Um I've been undertaking research in eastern Uganda in the town of Mbali for quite some time. It's both peripheral in the world and perhaps even the regional economy, even though I think it's very important. But it's also critical to the operations of the Northern Corridor, which stretches from the port from Mombasa into the East African hinterlands. And recently, Mbali's been the site of quite a few new global infrastructure project investments, including the rehabilitation of the old um colonial railway up to Gulu in the north of the country, and the establishment of a special economic zone, um, which is probably the most advanced in the country. It's called the Sino Uganda and Valley Industrial Park. It's a partnership between the Uganda Investment Authority and a private Chinese company with little or no stake-state investment in it. And like many other cases that we've looked at in the project across different towns and cities, is reliant on the securitisation of the land. So, like all these big infrastructure projects, they're fenced off, they're securitized, they have advanced forms of surveillance. People that inhabited that land beforehand are evicted. In the case of Mbali, this is violent eviction for some shattered lives and communities living in the wake of this logistical restructuring. But we also see these same households that are displaced and now working in the factories in the zone. They're finding a new toehold, however small, in a new place to live, outside of the securitised zone, space that now operates on top of what launched their spaces of dwelling. So it's really important to think about both injustice and inequality in the way in which these projects land in the towns and cities, but also the kind of forms of associate associo I'm not even going to say it, of everyday life. Because there's something interesting at play here, right? You you go into the zone, there's new Chinese capitalists and technicians sitting at the restaurant at the end of the day after they've kind of realized a new kind of operation. There's visiting dignitaries from town, tasting Chinese food perhaps for the first time, or using chopsticks, um, while securing some kind of new contracting agreement with factory managers that provides other forms of employment in the town. There's municipal staff negotiating with park authorities about environmental regulations that have been ignored. But they're trying to piece something back together after this kind of massive event. So the industrial park in Bali is a really kind of pertinent example of how these projects land in place in towns and cities. And I think also show how global China is a variegated presence involving all kinds of different actors, drivers, financial arrangements, local organizational fixes and such like. So alongside the very specific roles of national and local actors, which we also have to pay attention to when thinking about this kind of landing, um, and then other kinds of lives that inhabit um the spaces around them. So I think this kind of broad assumptions about China's role in the global infrastructure race are correct if they're a bit flat, i.e., you know, the BRI is a spatial fix for overaccumulation in China, andor it's a grand geopolitical strategy that seeks to reposition China amongst global affairs. But what grounded research does that we've conducted on this panel and also in this room is show a kind of spectrum of ways in which we can unpack the lived experience of global infrastructure and really think what it means when this is Chinese investment.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:31

Okay, thank you. So now we have we've broken apart China in the sense that we know that it's by no means a unitary actor. The combination of actors involved is shifting over time significantly, and it doesn't always do the things it says it's doing. Um but in a final segment here, let's let's try and actually decentre it all together because we have obviously mainly focused mainly focused on China for for good reason, and I think that's come through clearly. But um, what are some of the risks of this? I mean, what what is it really about China, this infrastructure race? What do we miss by focusing too much on China? Back to you, John.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:04

Great. So let's center and decentre. Um I think I did the decentering because I'm not a China expert.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:12

Um but I think nobody's a China expert. Nobody is.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:16

Um but I think you know the narrative of the global infrastructure race, um, the second cold war, the security issues around the Belt of Road initiative, the fear of the Chinese debt trap, the influence of China government on urban and national scale projects. These are actually all the kind of issues that you could be thinking about in relation to the US. They're kind of the same issues that we should be paying attention to with rising powers, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council. And I think one thing that Scholarship has done right with global China is to bring some of these issues to the fore. So I think the question is how we can take the understandings and the critical attention that has gone into the Belt and Road for 10, still 10 years, yeah, since its inception, and mobilise that in different ways across different kinds of geopolitical and geoeconomic actors. And I think that both centres and decentres China. It shows that China is the impetus to much of what's going on around global infrastructure, but it also demonstrates that it's just one actor amongst many. Perhaps more importantly, as researchers, is to be responsible in how we think about global China within the role of global infrastructure projects. In the West, including in the UK, there's increasingly a growing climate hostility and war preparation towards China. And I think how we mobilise our Research or how it's mobilised once we published could be a really important issue going into the future. So let's centre and decentre.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:10

Let's have a huge round of applause for our panel.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:28

What a fascinating discussion and superbly chaired, Tom. Thank you very much. I thought there were a few things that really struck me about everything that they said. I mean, I was particularly struck when John was describing towards the end these urban impacts as being like a bomb going off, you know, these world-shattering events through these global infrastructure corridors. It just leaves you with a really profound sense of the impacts on people's everyday lives far away from the decisions that are being made about these global infrastructure investments. And I thought it was really interesting to bring back that discussion about Manchester and how it lands into the UK. If there'd been time, I would have quite liked to unpack a little bit more how the UK was positioned in these different corridors, whether we have our just our own corridors or how we're implicated in corridors that are extending across the globe. Because it reminded me as well of one of the recent uh items I was going to cover on a radar at some point, around how local and national elites enable this kind of investment, but sometimes also provide a safety net when those investments fail and bail out these big companies. And so in Sheffield, a particularly relevant example is obviously around steel. And people will remember that just this year there's been all this concern over the role of the Chinese owners of British steel, Xinji, and in April, I think it was, the government had to pass this emergency legislation to take control of the Scunthorpe plant. So, you know, actually taxpayers' money is being used to bail out these kinds of big infrastructure investments. And although that's not necessarily part of a corridor, it still raises these bigger questions, I think, about the variegated nature of investment. I think what it also raises is that the way that that's presented in the media is very much about the monolith of China. Whereas actually, you know, we don't understand, and we're not encouraged to understand through media here in the UK, which parts of the Chinese sort of statecraft, these state-owned enterprises are at play here. And I think that's really interesting to sort of think through examples locally that we might find of things like steel and then unpack how that is represented in the media. And I wondered there as well, sort of thinking about what Linda was saying, as to whether or not the grand narrative actually serves Chinese interests in any way or Chinese statecraft and whether sort of the opacity about how things work can sometimes be an advantage or not. I don't know. I thought there's also this really interesting point about how research lands and how it's mobilised and how it's used. Um we have been spending quite a bit of time at the Urban Institute thinking about what it means to research on and in China and the kinds of partnerships we have. Uh, and we know again very recently from the news that that can be quite difficult and sensitive. But there was this recent case, um, as people will be aware in the media, just this week actually, of the Sheffield Hallam academic who was doing research on human rights on supply chains and the alleged forced labour in China of the Uyghurs, this Muslim minority, um, and how politically sensitive that can be and how broiled in questions of freedom of expression and free speech that becomes.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:30

Yeah. And how it can come right home to a city like Sheffield. Exactly. Which you you might not really expect, actually. Um Yeah, so I had a few other thoughts. I mean, it was a very interesting discussion, and obviously we had a lively discussion in the room, uh, which we didn't record because it was. We had some great QAs, didn't we? Yeah, so we didn't, but uh I wanted to actually pick up a few things that weren't so discussed in the QA, which is not so relevant to our audience here, but um, because there were things I would have asked if I weren't chairing and if there had been more time. But um and one is in a way, it's interesting, the discussion around the Second Cold War narrative. I wanted to just reflect on that briefly because in some ways this infrastructure race, you know, and Seth Schindler and Jessica DeCarlo have been writing a lot about this, and Jengli and I actually had a chapter in their book on the role of infrastructure in this kind of Second Cold War US-China and and this kind of the way in which infrastructure is absolutely central to that. And in some ways, early discussions of a Second Cold War, kind of five years ago or so, maybe that's not early, but compared to now, I was a bit skeptical of the idea that you could compare this to the Cold War because it was really so different what's happening between the US and China, not really ideological, not really military, not obviously territorial in the same way. But I i it it's interesting because now I feel like in some ways it is becoming more like the Cold War, partly because of the centrality of defense spend and the militarization of this race, which particularly since the war in Ukraine has become quite central. So in some ways it is becoming more Cold Warlike, but also in some ways it is becoming less Cold War-like because we see this fragmentation as well, which perhaps didn't come through as much in the discussion as it could have, where yes, there is China and it's playing this huge role, but these other actors, um, whether it's in military terms, obviously Russia is very much in the frame again, but also in terms of infrastructure and tech investments and things, you know, there are other actors from India, which is really significant when we look at the kind of trade war and the technological investments around the world. And also the Gulf countries playing this really important role. And I want to focus for a minute on the Gulf because I mean John did talk about it. And of course, they're also very significant in investing in our cities here. But this really complicates, I think, in a way, this idea of a Cold War. We see investments from the UAE and Saudi Arabia really ramping up in both at home and abroad. And while at the moment, you know, you've got these kind of something like 31 billion investments in 2025 from the UAE, I've seen 150 billion from Saudi, it's mostly domestic, but it's becoming more and more overseas. And what's really interesting is we see actors in the Gulf committing significant hundreds of billions of dollars to investments in places like the US. So we've also got those kinds of countries investing in infrastructure within the US, within the UK, in ways that's really very different from the kind of dynamics of the Cold War.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:09

I think the thing about the Cold War narrative is that it risks being another grand narrative, actually, that so presupposes this sort of binary superpower conflict. Whereas actually what we've talked about a lot on the podcast and came through this panel was the mobilization of soft power alongside sort of deeply entrenched strategies of militarisation. And so I wonder if it's also a bit of a grand narrative that doesn't stand up when you start unpacking who is involved and what kinds of circuits of power are being deployed and how.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:39

I mean, it's very interesting, and I think it will continue to run because there are these resonances with the Cold War that are important to bear in mind in terms of the risks of this kind of race while you've still got, you know, you're not in active conflict, although obviously in places like Ukraine there is active conflict. But there's also that question of where does ideology fit in, right? Because in a way, that's the that is the big difference. Slightly different from your soft power point, but again, it's kind of in the realm of the ideational. That ideological conflict isn't quite there. But I think who's to say it won't appear? And particularly when we start thinking about, so I'm gonna say in a minute, I'm gonna talk about tech and AI in my last point here, but you know, the very different attitudes towards whether the state takes an active role in regulating that or not. This is really fundamental in the difference between China and the US, for example, and the way these things are being evolved. And so I think there's potential for a new kind of ideological conflict to emerge around some of these investments. And this leads me to my other point, which is really that there was, I felt an absence, and we would have got there in the Q ⁇ A, of this question of data center investments and tech infrastructure in the discussion, because it is, and people will know we've talked about this in previous episodes, but it is becoming enormous. Uh it's talked about in this way that's, you know, trillions of dollars. You hear often three trillion dollars to be invested in in AI dentisters. I I read something about a $1.5 trillion funding gap, which reminded me of the whole infrastructure gap thing. I mean, who's who's to say that's a gap as if it's necessary for us to fill that? That was from a Morgan Stanley report. McKinsey have reported a 6.7 trillion likely spend on AI by 2030. I mean, this is this is absolutely crazy, right? That's twice the UK's annual GDP. Um so if we even look at what's happening now, though, we can see that we've seen almost half a trillion dollars, 475 billion, spent on data centers in 2025 alone. Now, it's still less than the great powers internationally are spending on transport, energy, and other kinds of infrastructure, but it's really growing as a proportion. And we also see China is central. So China spent $100 billion apparently this year on data centers. Only about a quarter of that is overseas, but still that's substantial and that's growing. And if you look at Latin America and Africa, about 80% of the new data center infrastructures that are going in there are financed internationally, primarily by the US, secondarily by China, and then you see these other actors coming in as well. So we're really seeing a race that's around a different kind of infrastructure, which I think involves different kinds of extraction and different kinds of regulation, and that is where I think this conversation will need to go.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:08

Absolutely, because I mean, is that the same global infrastructure race or is it a different kind of race and how do they interrelate? And it just makes me think, like thinking about Simon's keynote that preceded this panel, um, of course, he was arguing that you can't understand, you can't do urban studies anymore without taking infrastructure seriously, that we've moved from thinking about socio-technical systems to the techno-social and its in centrality within urban studies. But actually, there is still a very hard infrastructure race about the nuts and bolts of the railway of the port that is implied in the initial global infrastructure race we've been talking about. And of course, you've just beautifully illustrated how that is itself not necessarily reflecting the ways in which we need to rethink infrastructure. So we'd better wrap up. We're gonna have a lot more coming out from these two projects. So if people are intrigued and want to follow more, um, John has a Substack newsletter that you can subscribe to. He mentioned in the feature as well that there's going to be a new report and some films coming out soon with Karachi Urban Lab. There's a book uh on material geographies of the Belt and Road coming out as well. And Linda and colleagues have an edited book coming out on environmental transitions and which draws on some of the sort of conceptualisation and framing of the pluralised project. So lots to look out for.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:21

Absolutely. That is all we've got time for for now, though. So we hope you've enjoyed listening, and please do join us next time for more Urban Radio.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:29

Bye.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:30

Bye.