Geopolitical economy and the production of territory: The case of US–China geopolitical-economic competition in Asia

Recent work in political geography and Marxist, critical political economy has refocused attention on the interrelations between political economy and geopolitics. This paper examines the contributions of Antonio Gramsci to the theory of geopolitical economy and the production of territory. Doing so enables two key insights. First, explaining the production of territory requires unraveling multiple—sometimes competing—levels of geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations. It follows that geopolitical economy requires historicizing the practices of territorialization. The second point is that the practice of territorialization is today everywhere bound up with the project of producing and reproducing capitalist (i.e. class) social relations, including the capitalist form of the state as a social relation. To support this claim, we examine recent US–China hegemonic competition in regional, geoeconomic strategies—US’s “Trans-Pacific Partnership” and China’s “One Belt, One Road” Initiative.