Chinese migrant entrepreneurs as symbolic broker: grassroots practices in the bottom-up production of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) discourse

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in China and Laos, the article traces how Chinese migrant entrepreneurs participate in the production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) discourse. It introduces the concept of “symbolic broker” to reveal the dual processes through which these actors engage in discourse production: on the one hand, they are mobilized as symbolic capital within provincial BRI narratives to demonstrate cross-border connectivity; on the other hand, they actively translate their transnational experiences into development discourses that align with provincial agendas. In this way, migrant entrepreneurs perform connective and mediatory roles at the intersection of grassroots transnational practices, provincial development agendas, and national strategies. The article thus contributes to Global China scholarship by demonstrating how BRI narratives are actively reshaped from the ground up.