William A. Callahan, editor
Where is China going? What does its alternative global order look like? We hear a lot about China’s grand projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, but how are they experienced on the ground in Africa, South America, and Asia?
The Chinese Global Orders project brings together twenty-two scholars from five continents to explore these questions. As these four commentaries show, it seeks to pluralize the discussion by exploring “Chinese” beyond the PRC nation-state, “Global” as a space beyond the international, and “Orders” as a plural set of norms.
The project seeks to do more than just describe Global China’s material impact, and it does this by employing a new set of concepts to theorize Chinese interactions in local, national, regional, and global spaces.
Over the next four weeks, this set of essays will mobilize the concepts of (in)visibility (Karrar), hypervisibility (Callahan), (il)legibility (Morris), and then (in)visibility again with a twist (Whiteman) to provoke new understandings of China’s engagement with the world.
This section starts with Hasan H. Karrar’s “(In)visible China?,” which problematizes top-down and state-centric views of “Global China” by examining how Chinese global orders appear in Pakistan through the paradoxical interplay of visibility and invisibility—what Karrar calls (in)visibility. In other words, while China is very visible in elite national discourse, Chinese companies’ substantial investments and interventions are largely invisible in discussions of local society and politics in Pakistan.
This is the first article in the four-part (In)Visible China: Understanding Chinese Global Orders series, co-hosted by LSE IDEAS’ China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.
China’s influence over global governance and security, as well as its exercise of soft power, all reference geopolitics on a planetary level. But what happens when we scale down the conversation about global orders to the places where Chinese power is deployed? How visible—or not—is Chinese authority in such places?
This article discusses Pakistan’s experience with China’s growing influence, illustrating the complex dynamics of China's visibility and invisibility in the country.
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This is the third article in the four-part (In)Visible China: Understanding Chinese Global Orders series, co-hosted by LSE IDEAS’ China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.
William Callahan's article argues that rather than just focusing on visible and invisible, it’s helpful to think about how China is either invisible or hypervisible, especially in the Global South. This is important because it means that China is not visible in a normal and accessible way to non-elite “people-on-the-street.”
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This is the third article in the four-part (In)Visible China: Understanding Chinese Global Orders series, co-hosted by LSE IDEAS’ China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.
China in Pakistan: hypervisible yet invisible. From Lahore's "other" Orange Line to critiques of CPEC as a "colonial project," how do local actors navigate China's legibility—and its limits? Explore the paradoxes of global China: everywhere, nowhere, and vulnerable.
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This is the fourth article in the four-part (In)Visible China: Understanding Chinese Global Orders series, co-hosted by LSE IDEAS’ China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.
Shaping Visible and Invisible Space through Everyday Surveillance in China. This article explores how surveillance and state control are embedded in both visible and invisible architectural and infrastructural spaces in China. Whiteman examines how architecture and surveillance structures order society. While monumental state buildings are physically visible expressions of authority, much of the state's power operates in less conspicuous, hidden forms, such as surveillance systems.
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This series is co-hosted by China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.