Self-Othering and Neighboring: The Constitution of Central Asia in the Chinese internationalist discourse with the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

By analysing Chinese academic discourse longitudinally, the article investigates the discourses through which Chinese scholars conceptualised Central Asia as a world region after the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This study considers the BRI as the starting point for a new momentum in China’s relations with Central Asia and a favourable temporal juncture to examine how the region has recently been politically reconstituted. Methodologically, a corpus of forty academic texts in the Chinese language was analysed through the discourse-historical variant of qualitative discourse analysis. The research aims to strengthen the Critical Studies on Regions’ approach by presenting an empirical case of regions’ cyclical reconstitution. Moreover, the article proposes to re-focus the research agenda by considering integrating insights on knowledge production in non-Western International Relations.