China’s Path to Power Runs Through the World’s Cities

In October 2023, world leaders gathered in Beijing to mark the tenth anniversary of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the centerpiece of recent Chinese grand strategy. The BRI has received enormous attention for its eye-popping price tag and its huge and protean ambitions. Having already invested around $1 trillion, China intends to link more than 150 countries by new roads, railways, seaports, energy systems, and technological and cyberspace innovations, encouraging commerce and connectivity and drawing two-thirds of the world’s population yet closer to Chinese markets and political influence.

For all the scrutiny the BRI has received, however, a key aspect is often overlooked: that it is, among other things, a sweeping urbanization project, one that may define the future of many cities around the world—especially if other great powers do not contest it. The development of cities is often, wrongly, neglected in the analysis of international relations. But there is an intrinsic connection between infrastructure, urban form, and the shape of the international orders that great powers build. Throughout history, great powers have used cities not only as nodes of commercial and religious connection but as sites for the real and symbolic projection of power. The U.S. unipolar moment that took shape in the aftermath of the Cold War was undergirded by the creation of a distinctive urban form: the global city. Cities such as London, New York, Seoul, Sydney, and Tokyo were, over decades, reshaped by the expansion of the liberal free market. In turn, their rise strengthened the United States’ world-spanning influence.

China, however, is now beginning to generate its own distinctive infrastructural and urban forms: during its era of economic opening, experimentation, and explosive growth that began in 1979, it transformed locales inside its borders, extending them up and out into space by building skyscrapers and urbanizing rural areas while also connecting them to regional and far-flung economies. Urban spaces have for four decades been central to China’s economic and strategic vision, predating the BRI. But the attention and resources Beijing is now turning to them through the BRI, at home and abroad, portends a transformation in the lives of billions of city dwellers.

China’s long-term strategy for the BRI always had the symbolic date of 2049 in mind—the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in the mid-twentieth-century Chinese Civil War. If the BRI is successful, the vision is of a world transformed, a twenty-first-century reincarnation of the ancient and medieval Silk Roads, the trading networks and urban hubs that tied together the peoples of Africa and Eurasia for over a thousand years before the rise of the West. The enhanced connectivity China intends to create could generate a new kind of transnational market, transforming the connective tissue of the global economy. The BRI has already begun to dramatically grow China’s influence over other cities at a variety of scales from the very small to the immense: from the 2012 Chinese-led redevelopment of a marketplace in the fishing port of Cape Coast in Ghana to new ports such as Hambantota in Sri Lanka and the transfiguration of two thousand miles of territory in Pakistan. Beijing is experimenting with eco-cities that may be a boon to transition to sustainable forms of urban life—but also exporting new technologies of urban surveillance and control.

The BRI represents the possibility that the international order may be rebuilt not through war but through the construction of material conduits that carry Chinese influence, culture, and developmental models around the world. If Western countries wish to both retain their economic and geopolitical influence and protect the cosmopolitan culture that has been a staple of urban spaces for decades, they must more seriously consider how to match the BRI. This will not be easy. U.S. and EU policymakers have begun to develop infrastructure initiatives that are designed to compete geopolitically with the BRI; these schemes need greater support.

But leaders in these increasingly fractious and disorganized democracies lack China’s ability to mobilize huge resources quickly and to plan across a half century. They must move both faster and with predictability and commitment over longer time horizons. The BRI, after all, is not simply an infrastructure project. It is already carrying Chinese influence around the world and laying the foundations for an alternative Chinese-led international order.

URBAN LEGENDS

For millennia, great powers’ influence has depended on cities and infrastructure. And the form cities take has, in turn, been shifted by empires. When Alexander the Great struck out from Macedonia to try to conquer the world, he left in his wake a string of new cities across the Middle East and Central Asia, establishing a long-lasting legacy of Greek culture and architecture. During its colonial era, the British Empire invested heavily in rail and port infrastructure to project power worldwide; even today, its ports, railways, government and commercial buildings, and legal culture still anchor cities as far flung as New Delhi in India, Pretoria in South Africa, and Wellington in New Zealand.

The decades immediately following World War II were another pivotal moment in the history of the city. Across Europe and Asia, cities had to be rebuilt. France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union supported massive housing projects designed to transform the lives of working- and middle-class people worldwide, renegotiating the relationship between citizen and government. As the Cold War deepened, the United States and the Soviet Union undertook special efforts to influence the development of cities beyond their borders. U.S. automobiles, prefabricated housing, and home appliances were shipped around the world with support from the U.S. government, U.S. businesses, and cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, introducing democratic ideals of design and habits of consumptions to millions.

The Soviet Union invested in imposing edifices that served as symbols of communist sophistication and power, such as the Palace of Culture and Science in Poland, the sixth-tallest building in the EU; Warsaw’s skyline is still defined by it. And Moscow invested in mass housing developments that became comparable to small cities, carefully curating their social spaces according to communist ideals. The late-twentieth-century collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of free-market liberalism accelerated the expansion of the “global city”: in Tokyo, skyscrapers sprouted in Roppongi Hills, Shiodome, and Shinagawa, joining the city’s ancient yokocho, its restaurant-studded webs of alleys and back streets, in defining the cityscape and its economy.

Consultants, lawyers, and other corporate service experts began to move freely and comfortably between such global cities. This urban form was underpinned by the hegemony of U.S. power, which secured a global market and culture that stressed free enterprise. But as these cities became beacons for international wealth and talent, they also amplified globalization’s attendant social inequality. It is becoming less and less clear how long that free-market hegemony will last, given the fragilities of the global economic system, the United States’ increasingly polarized politics—and the extraordinary rise of China. 

URBAN SPRAWL

No nation in history has urbanized at the scale China did between 1980 and 2020. In 1978, 20 percent of China’s population lived in urban areas; now, over 60 percent of it does. Chinese urban policy focused on rapid building construction and economic growth and experimentation in “special economic zones,” which enabled the deployment of unique economic policies. After Beijing afforded Shenzhen SEZ status in 1980, the Shenzhen SEZ’s urban area grew to more than 600 times the size of the original market town. As China experimented with markets and special economic zones in its coastal cities, agglomeration economies that resulted from the reduction of barriers to capital established themselves.

China’s rapid urbanization generated distinctive architectural and construction styles, heavy civil infrastructure, urban sprawl, and a disregard for historical landmarks, but its policies have also been evolving. Since the 1990s, Chinese state strategy has also stressed the idea of an “ecological civilization,” integrating sustainability into its city planning. In 2004, China identified the subtropical city of Guiyang as an eco-pilot city to test sustainable urban development concepts such as the circular economy; it has already spent around $80 billion on Xiong’an, a new city 60 miles from Beijing projected to be the size of New York and London combined. Intended to become a Chinese example of the “socialist city,” Xiong’an will blend the ecological and the digital: a city of parks and forests, it also will have a digital “twin” in which every building and infrastructural component is represented on an evolving virtual map. China’s most recent Five-Year Plan extols the virtues of “people-centered” and green urban spaces.

The intended scope of the BRI suggests that China’s experiments in rapid urban growth and connectivity could eventually form the basis for a successor to the global city. The very fabric of cities in regions from East Asia to East Africa are already coming under the BRI’s influence. Beijing has invested in highway-building projects that connect cities in Central Asia via high-speed railways that integrate Chinese cities with European terminals such as London, and a “digital silk road” that, among other goals, links western China through Pakistan and down to cities in East Africa. As these infrastructures coalesce, they are transforming cities. Khorgos, once a sleepy town on the Chinese-Kazakh border, is now a busy logistics center, with blocks of stacked containers emerging from the Eurasian steppes into a bustling free-trade and duty-free zone. A “dry port” through which new high-speed freight trains pass on their way to different regions the BRI targets, Khorgos now connects almost 100 Chinese cities to nearly 200 cities in Europe and more than a dozen in Central, East, and Southeast Asia.

Beyond the Chinese border, since 2018, the BRI has reshaped Astana, the Kazakh capital, into a regional international finance hub, financing the construction of a new central business district anchored by the Astana International Finance Center and the striking Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center. Translucent and shaped like a tent, the entertainment center’s architecture is futuristic while recalling the Silk Road nomadic empires. In East Africa, the BRI is funding railway construction and a new deep-water port project on the Kenyan coast to create a new transnational economic corridor connecting Kenya, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.

The Belt and Road Initiative already offers tantalizing glimpses of a world that could better tackle climate change.

China intends to unite urban corridors on different continents by investing in what it calls “Maritime Silk Road” port cities. China’s existing major seaports will be linked to a string of ports outside China in strategic locations: Piraeus in Greece, Kyaukphyu in Myanmar, Gwadar in Pakistan, and Colombo and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. China hopes its investment in Mediterranean ports in particular can begin to draw trade away from the traditional dominance of northern European ports such as Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, and Antwerp. Alongside these more traditional infrastructure investments, the BRI aims to offer new forms of digital connectivity: Chinese companies such as Huawei are building new submarine cables, data centers, and smart-city platforms in places as diverse as Pakistan, East Africa, and South America.

These are desperately needed interventions in places left behind by the digital revolution, but they also give China an opening to incorporate new countries into its domestic version of the Internet, which emphasizes social control. Digital systems trialed in Chinese cities such as Kashgar—where, since terrorist attacks in 2008 and 2011, surveillance cameras, facial- and gait-recognition scans, license-plate recognition, checkpoints, ID cards, and digital-control centers have become part of everyday life—are finding their way into other cities around the world. Since the BRI was launched, Chinese companies have sold “safe city” solutions to major metropolises in Ecuador, Kenya, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Starting in 2019, Serbia installed thousands of Chinese-made cameras with advanced facial- and license-plate-recognition software in 800 locations in Belgrade and 40 other cities around the country. In cities shaped by the BRI, social control and efficiency of governance may be given more weight than individual freedom.

And yet the BRI also offers tantalizing glimpses of a world that could better engage with intractable problems such as climate change. With the BRI, China hopes that its experiments in sustainable urban practice at home can be used as models elsewhere. “Ecological cities” across Southeast Asia, such the $100 billion Forest City under construction on four islands between Malaysia and Singapore; this city aims to create sustainable urban living for up to a million people by 2035. At the 2019 China-ASEAN Summit, China and the ASEAN member states launched the Smart City Cooperation Initiative, which laid out a commitment to further develop a smart-cities ecosystem in Asia combining digital innovation and sustainability.

CONCRETE BUNGLE

If the BRI is successful in the way that China hopes, it could usher in a new kind of city, one that may form the basis for a new international order. Africa and Eurasia could become much more urbanized, with sprawling, transnational urban corridors connected by high-speed transit and integrated more fully into China’s immense and increasingly sophisticated market. Small cities may be transformed into thriving logistics hubs that would direct the movement of goods around a new supercontinent. Chinese expatriates and the soft-power influence of Chinese culture and language may become commonplace in hundreds of cities worldwide, and urban spaces may become increasingly efficient, safe, and sustainable. These BRI-influenced cities may knit forests and green spaces into the urban fabric in the service of ecological principles—potentially playing a valuable role in mitigating the effects of climate change.

But urban life would likely become more tightly controlled and regulated. Surveillance may become much more ubiquitous as governments circumscribe citizens’ digital access in the name of cyber-sovereignty. The city as an international commercial hub could thrive, but the city as liberal, cosmopolitan enclave may wither.

The United States and other large powers such as the EU would not relish this outcome. It would signal that the liberal international order they have constructed over seven decades is being reengineered from the ground up by a state with very different values and interests. U.S. and EU leaders have already begun to try to counter the BRI with alternative forms of infrastructural geopolitics. U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to develop a new national industrial strategy with green technologies and jobs at its core, with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act focused on infrastructure and climate change abroad as well as at home. The legislation earmarked around $370 billion for green-energy transition projects.

If the BRI is successful, it could usher in a new kind of city—and a new international order.

The Build Back Better World initiative—announced at the 2021 G-7 Summit and later rebranded as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment—aims to coordinate G-7 states’ investment in low- and middle-income countries; it represents a clear attempt to respond to the BRI’s potential to influence the global South, with an initial fund of $600 billion provided by the G-7 and private firms. Its projects include the construction of an India–Middle East–Europe Corridor, announced in September 2023 by the United States and the EU along with India, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia; this corridor would link these continents with new digital infrastructures and transport networks, including maritime routes and railways. The plan borrows from the BRI playbook. The EU, for its part, has offered a series of new strategies for Africa and India with its 2021 $300 billion Global Gateway program, which emphasizes infrastructure investments that adhere to higher social and environmental standards that reflect European values regarding development, human rights, and sustainability.

These schemes must be given more support. But the West will likely continue to have trouble coordinating large-scale and long-term projects that come near matching the BRI. Grand strategic thinking is difficult for democratic regimes stuck in short-term political cycles. It was not always so, however: the post–World War II Marshall Plan, to which the BRI is sometimes compared, deployed extraordinary resources to reconstruct a devastated Europe. This was not only an act of solidarity but also a clear strategic plan to help keep Western European states out of Moscow’s orbit.

Today is another historic moment in which a long-term, generational, grand strategic vision is necessary. Policymakers must rediscover the too often neglected connection between infrastructure, cities, and international influence. Democracies have, at key moments, shown themselves to be resilient, capable, and committed when it comes to long-term strategic efforts; recent gathering momentum around addressing climate change suggests they still can be. The West must rise to the complex challenges of refining its vision of sustainable and connected urban life—a vision that incorporates its values—and mobilizing the resources to complete it. At stake is not merely which country will wield more geopolitical influence in the future; infrastructure investment will also shape the day-to-day life for billions of people who live in cities. Cities have long offered economic opportunity, improved health, cultural vitality, and fostered cosmopolitanism. But they are not guaranteed to do so.