When Geopolitics Meets Development on the Belt and Road: A Confucian Journey

As China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) traverses the decade that began with a global pandemic, big infrastructure plans are not enough. The coronavirus pandemic, as in many sectors, has hastened the imperative for adaptive change. Development in its wider sense needs to be rediscovered. This is where Confucian philosophy can help. As with the BRI itself there are in fact many routes and directions to development. In cultivating/developing ourselves and others, Confucius would concur that we can live harmoniously without being the same or privileging a more narrowly economic version of development. This change would amount to a culturally-infused political economy within the BRI, where infrastructures of the mind matter as much as the nuts and bolts of ports and transport links. More specifically, the BRI is well positioned to spread a different ontology of development at a time when a virus had forced the world into re-examining its old assumptions.