“Belt and Road” is big. The world's preoccupation with Belt and Road—much like its historic preoccupation with China—is with its size, both real and imagined. Belt and Road is big, but imagination has also given it a material concreteness and strategic coherence that belies the varied negotiations and contingencies that underlie it. This is a key takeaway of The Belt Road and Beyond by Min Ye and Rivers of Iron by David M. Lampton, Selina Ho, and Cheng-Chwee Kuik.
Offering windows on different politics of Chinese infrastructure development, the two books are joined by more than their empirical subject matter. For one, they are distinguished by their common interest in the question: How do critical audiences and agents interpret, respond to, and shape China's infrastructure initiatives and to what effect? As both books highlight, in China, where the center's directives are often ambiguous by design or by necessity, there are...
