Boundary-making with India: Chinese developmental identity and the uses of geography

This article critically examines the geography-based representations of India’s development, or lack thereof, in narratives by Chinese scholars and commentators, and how they make visible the continually reconfigured processes of territorializing China’s developmental identity in lieu of its contemporary rise. Existing analysis has unpicked the growing deployment of culturally embedded historical reasoning in various Chinese discourses and works to characterize China’s domestic and foreign policies. This article, however, teases out the slim evidence currently available in popular, scholarly narratives that used environmentally deterministic geographical reasoning to justify China’s civilizational uniqueness and developmental success. By boundary-making with India as a symbol of difference, Chinese intellectual elites project their aspirations and anxieties about China’s identity both as a nation and as an enduring civilization. While most discussions about China’s (inter)national identity are anchored in the East–West and North–South axes, it is argued that juxtaposition within the East–South can be just as, if not more, revealing of the complexity and ambiguity in China’s search for its ‘place’ in the world.