Make development great again? Accumulation regimes, spaces of sovereign exception and the elite development paradigm of China's Belt and Road Initiative

This article studies what I describe as “state-coordinated investment partnerships,” an investment modality central to the deployment of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These partnerships bring together state and business actors to export overcapacity and address infrastructural demands in underdeveloped markets. To do so, they require accumulation and sovereignty regimes that mirror, in contingent ways, similar social arrangements within China. The superposition of such regimes and the interests and social imaginaries of local actors produces forms of uneven and combined development and shapes the contours of the BRI's emerging developmental and geoeconomic footprints. The BRI exports also an elite development paradigm which promotes urbanization, connectivity and economic growth over participatory approaches. This paradigm projects a depoliticized version of China's present into the BRI's future to justify social and environmental dislocations, and shields Chinese firms from civil society scrutiny. My analysis rejects this elite perspective and favors a labor-centric approach that unearths the social foundations of the BRI. From this perspective, despite relevant differences in format, the BRI's quintessential investment modality is closely aligned to a contemporary global current of public-private partnerships endeavored to mobilize public resources and state power for the expansion of capitalist social relations.