The (Geo)politics of the Belt and Road Initiative: economic corridors in Indonesia and the Philippines

Using case studies of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Corridor (RCEC) in Indonesia and the Subic-Clark Corridor (SCC) in the Philippines, this article delves into the capitalist contradictions underpinning the geopolitics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Advancing the concept of geoeconomics-uneven and combined development (G-UCD), we point to two-parallel processes which give shape to the trajectory of BRI in Southeast Asia. First, contradictions arising out of the pressures of global capitalism and the limits of the Chinese economy have led to the need for Chinese entities to seek new markets for reinvestment, exports, and resource extraction. Second, while Southeast Asia might provide a new fix for Chinese capital, the process is not straightforward. There is invariably a lack of symmetry in the expansion of Chinese capital in part due to uneven and combined capitalism. Here, Chinese entities must grapple not only with local content or “the political embeddedness of Chinese firms,” but also with inter-capitalist competition, great power politics, and class strategies. As a result, the BRI-tagged corridors become embedded with and transformed by local accumulation regimes, geoeconomics shifts, and wider social relations, as demonstrated through ownership, technological levels, and personnel. This article provides a crucial geoeconomic perspective which not only challenges normative construction of geopolitics as malign, imperialist, and superior, but also provides a more nuanced lens for examining the “internal” social relations of geopolitics and capital accumulation attached to the BRI and other similar grand strategies.