Belt and Road Initiative: An Assessment of Socio-Cultural Impacts

Abstract

The article examines the socio-cultural effects of the BRI in the period of 2013-2026. People-to-people linkage and language policy, vocational training, labour encounter, media projection, heritage diplomacy and identity politics have been given a more nuanced but thin treatment when compared with infrastructure finance and debt, which have been the focus of the official narratives and academic discourses. Based on soft-power and geocultural-power theory, on China's white paper on BRI from 2023, on membership estimates from independent sources (150 states), and on published fieldwork in Pakistan, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Western Balkans, the paper concludes that the BRI is a cultural project and a social disruption at the same time. Despite shrinking in the West, pedagogical tools such as Confucius Institutes, scholarships to China via the Silk Road, Luban Workshops and agreements for the recognition of degrees have increased the spread of mandarinitization and mobility in the Global South. While reducing in the West, the extension of mandarin literacy and mobility in the Global South has been fostered by pedagogical instruments like Confucius Institutes, Silk Road scholarships, Luban Workshops and degree-recognition agreements. Interactions between Chinese labor camps and host communities yield mixed results: access and intercultural interaction on one side, enculturation and labor replacement, anti-Chinese protest on the other. Heritage diplomacy is nothing new, it is the Silk Roads in a new guise, and a train station with its accompanying mural and tour, as well as training journalists or local inhabitants for neighborhood conversation, represent another cultural form of anxiety. That culture is not just an ornamental accessory to ports and railways is not being assessed. What the BRI succeeds or fails to achieve in the societies in which it is implemented is the socio-cultural change.

Keywords: Belt And Road Initiative; Socio-Cultural Impacts; People-To-People Connectivity; Confucius Institutes; Luban Workshop; CPEC; Labour Migration; Startimes; Heritage Diplomacy; Identity