The ‘soft infrastructure’ of the Belt and Road Initiative: The case of Chinese transnational education in Malaysia

A Chinese university in Southeast Asia

Xiamen University Malaysia (XMUM) is an international branch campus (IBC) of Xiamen University (XMU), a prestigious public university in China. Government-to-government discussions between Malaysia and China regarding XMUM’s establishment began in 2012, and the campus commenced its inaugural student recruitment in December 2015. As Koh (2022) noted, this was the first precedent of a mainland Chinese public university establishing a comprehensive IBC in the Global South. This raises two interrelated questions: What is a mainland Chinese public university IBC doing in Malaysia? How might the establishment of XMUM relate to China’s strategy in the internationalisation of its higher education amid the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)?

Extant academic and policy discussions of the BRI have tended to focus primarily on its hard infrastructures such as cross-continental transport networks, energy and mining facilities, and communication technologies (see Drache et al., 2019). By contrast, less attention has been given to education, which is key to the BRI’s fifth goal: fostering people-to-people bonds. The Education Action Plan for the BRI (Belt and Road Portal, 2016) produced by China’s Ministry of Education highlights priority areas for educational cooperation through transnational education initiatives such as developing new educational linkages and exporting the Chinese model of education. Indeed, transnational education between China and SEA has not only introduced a new dynamic to the migration infrastructure that channels student mobility flows (Kirby & Wende, 2019; WENR, 2019), but has also allowed China to articulate its diplomatic and strategic interests in the region through educational capacity building for the region’s ‘emerging’ economies (see also Lim and Cheng, 2022).

In 2018-19, we embarked on research spanning across Xiamen and Malaysia to explore how transnational education helps shape and is reshaped by China's geopolitical and cultural diplomacy in Asia. Specifically, we examined how historical ties that predate the BRI connect the regions involved in the transnational education project; the everyday experiences that are (dis)connected from or (non)aligned with both the central vision and peripheral goals of the BRI-related project; and the ways in which power moves through various channels to support or undermine the BRI-related project. Our key findings are:

• XMUM functions as an extension of Chinese presence in the form of transnational higher education, enjoining China and Malaysia into a regional space through a set of transnational imaginaries, affinities, and subjectivities that are (re)produced across the state, the institution and the individual.
• Prevailing narratives of Chinese presence, including its projection of influence and power, have shaped student imaginaries and subjectivities to some extent, but they are also being contested, reinterpreted and challenged by students.
• The imaginaries, affinities and subjectivities that XMU aspires to develop through the BRI are unstable and provisional as they travel from institutionally-led visions on paper to students’ actually-existing realities.

To help us make sense of these findings, we developed the term 'soft infrastructure' to describe how transnational education mediates the (re)production of regional geopolitics and cultures. In drawing attention to the ‘soft’ side of infrastructures, the term also underscores the manner in which discursive and symbolic aspects of the BRI are mutually constitutive of the material or ‘hard’ infrastructures. In what follows, we discuss the concept of ‘soft infrastructure’ through the notions of imaginaries, affinities and subjectivities. We illustrate the meanings and utility of these notions through selected empirical findings. In the concluding section, we reflect on the relevance of transnational education as a form of soft infrastructure in a post-COVID world. 

Belt and Road’s Soft Infrastructure

The term ‘soft infrastructure’ is used by Peters (2019: 588) to emphasise that culture and education are core components accompanying the BRI's physical infrastructural developments. While there exists a common understanding of soft infrastructure as institutions, policies, trade agreements and services, this has been framed largely as state-driven and concerned with aspects of development. The explicit emphasis on culture allows for deeper inquiry into the intricate workings that cut into human experience, imagination and subjectivity. Building upon the premise that education is regarded as an enabler of talent cultivation, people-to-people bonds and cross-cultural understanding deemed crucial for the BRI's success, we turn to the interconnected concepts of imaginaries, affinities and subjectivities to develop soft infrastructure as an analytical lens for understanding transnational education. We ask: How does transnational education work as the BRI’s soft infrastructure in connecting places and forming regions? What are the lived experiences of the students who play multiple roles as the ambassadors and users of this soft infrastructure?

Imaginaries

The BRI’s geopolitical and geoeconomic reframing of disparate places and territories into new regional spaces represent a major redefinition of local and regional imaginaries. But because imaginaries are ‘culturally shared and socially transmitted’ representations that interact with personal imaginations (Salazar, 2020: 770), such regional spaces are glued together by ‘rather fuzzy sets of imaginaries’ that enfold current institutional logics and practices into historical narratives of regional identities and connections (Kuus, 2020: 1186). The concept of imaginaries is thus useful in highlighting how institutional and everyday production of connective scripts co-construct ‘invented’ knowledge and histories, including those of diasporic communities.

In our interviews with students at XMUM, we found that their post-study aspirations and mobility desires are strongly steered by their imaginaries surrounding future work and economic opportunities. This points to the discursive effect that the BRI has on students’ imaginations, regardless of nationality, particularly with respect to the notion that China’s rise as a global power is an inevitable process and its expanded economic presence in the southeast Asian region would enhance work opportunities. Only a handful of them problematize this narrative and pivot towards non-China related sites and destinations in their post-study imaginaries. But even so, a departure from the dominant BRI transnational economic imaginary makes clear that ‘not all individuals are exposed to, nor value the same images or places’ (Lipura & Collins, 2020: 351; see also Salazar, 2020).

Even as China’s economic and political influence powerfully frames students’ economic senses around post-study lives, other logics operate among the young people’s imaginations to shape what they hope to achieve and where they want to be upon graduation. Such logics may flow from the realms of romantic partnerships, family intimacies and embodied understandings of geopolitical tensions. Such localised imaginaries play a vital role alongside top-down imaginative framings of BRI in shaping the ways international students  centre China in the contemporary global and regional economy on the one hand, and decentre its place in their individual post-study mobility aspirations and desires on the other hand.

Affinities

An integral component that feeds into regional imaginaries is the idea of affinities. Affinities are cultural in that they are spatial and affective linkages which embody shared histories of mobility and exchange. Affinities are also political because such common grounds can ‘become key resources for those involved in promoting narratives of connectivity today’ (Winter, 2020: 10). Cultural and regional proximities are strategically evoked to create a sense of collectiveness, which is then mobilized to co-opt and drive the affiliated members towards a shared goal and/or trajectory.

In the case of XMUM, narratives in official documents and conversations with university administrators and staff construct the salience of historical and cultural connectivities in the imaginative and material production of XMUM’s public image and university culture. In particular, Tan Kah Kee, a respected overseas Chinese (海外华侨) of the Nanyang (i.e. Malaysia and Singapore) and his philanthropic contributions to the Chinese community’s education was used to legitimize the existence and operation of XMUM. At the Office of International Cooperation and Exchange at the Siming campus, an administrator involved in the operation of the XMUM branch campus remarked, ‘XMU and SEA, especially Malaysia and Singapore, share a deep and common root through Tan Kah Kee’. Separately, an XMU staff emphasized XMUM’s commitment of ‘not taking away a single cent [from Malaysia]’ and ‘to channel [any profits] back into scholarships and research’. She explained:

This commitment is because Tan Kah Kee gave his personal and family estates to XMU. This is a return of favour; a part of Chinese people’s tradition, 饮水思源 (‘awareness of the source of drinking water’, i.e. being grateful and appreciative) (pers. comm., December, 2018).

At an on-campus seminar delivered by an XMUM lecturer on Tan and corporate social responsibility, the speaker evoked nostalgic and ethno-nationalistic sentiments to convince the student audience that they should contribute back to XMUM—as Tan did. The speaker further emphasized that the students should be grateful for the opportunity to study at XMUM, which would not have been possible without Tan and his philanthropic contributions. However, and as we show in the published full article, the constant reference to Tan and his contributions by institutional actors were not uncritically and automatically received by the students.

Subjectivities

Infrastructures shape everyday life and mediate lived experiences to produce spatialized subjectivities. Writing about the relationship between imaginaries, infrastructures and aspirations in the context of international student mobilities in Asia, Collins (2013: 480) argues that students’ multiple understandings of the region and their mobility futures are shaped by ‘relatively stable social and institutional connections’ but they also exceed the rationalities and discourses that undergird their mobility experiences.

For instance, Chinese international students at XMUM are often framed as ‘young cultural ambassadors’ (青年文化大使). Yet, the idea that international students would uncritically fulfil the role of cultural ambassadors and carry out the diplomatic work assumes that they are passive individuals (Lomer, 2017). Mainland Chinese students whom we interviewed did not conceive of themselves as cultural messengers but instead understood their pursuit of overseas study as advancing personal development and building cultural capital for future social mobility. They were concerned with using their time and education at XMUM to improve their English language proficiency, earn respectable educational credentials that are recognized back in China and ‘western’ countries, and search for greater independence and opportunities to see the world. They also hoped to propel themselves to postgraduate study destinations; and as indicated by multiple posts on the XMUM Student Council public WeChat account, favourable.

Similarly, (international) students negotiate their subjective knowledge and practices through various emotional registers such as interpersonal ties and feelings of transnational belonging which may rework power configurations fostered by infrastructures (Sidhu et al., 2020). Even as infrastructures entail power techniques and discourses which are aimed at producing and training specific kinds of subjects, it is vital to pay attention to how differently positioned subjects respond to these infrastructural effects and in the process redefine imaginaries about places and regions.

Conclusion

In focusing on the single case of Chinese transnational education in Malaysia and its students, we gained qualitative insights which allow us to put forward the notion of soft infrastructure to capture the historical and contemporary (re)workings of imagination, culture and power that accompanies the BRI’s hard infrastructural developments. Rather than an uncritical acceptance of an ever-expanding Chinese presence and connectivities emphasized in hegemonic narratives of the BRI, an attention to the soft infrastructural aspects of imaginaries, affinities and subjectivities shows clearly the different points of contraction and stoppages that push back against the idea that Chinese transnational education can serve as a straightforward vehicle for the projection of influence and power.

Transnational education and student mobility plans derailed during the period of the COVID-19 are now being revived as nations move beyond the long shadow of the pandemic. Since China’s reopening of its borders, more Chinese youths are opting to study in countries in Southeast Asia (SEA) such as Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand rather than traditional western destinations, driven in part by relatively lower costs and also the emergence of study options in the region as an alternative to China’s tertiary education system (University World News, 2023). A distinct post-COVID situation that Chinese youths are facing is the increased emotional burden linked to long-term joblessness and the rise of a disillusioned generation of young people who choose to leave the very competitive milieu. What potential effects can this new cultural force have on how young people envision their futures and how educational mobility affects SEA countries? The epidemic has also quickened China's transition to BRI initiatives in the fields of digital economics and healthcare. In these rapidly expanding fields, new research and knowledge networks, educational and training facilities, and talent development initiatives are required. These initiatives will also create new forms of (contested) power, culture, and imagination that would go on to shape discourses and practices surrounding the BRI.

As Oakes’ (2021) observed, the BRI is not a monolithic policy or grand scheme devised by Xi but an ‘evolutionary discourse’ that invites diverse engagements with the discursive and material manifestations of BRI projects, their downstream effects, and the various responses to these extended Chinese presences. Soft infrastructure, we argue, has the potential to bring a capacious and sustained framework of analysis to such engagements needed for future research.

Note

This article is an abridged version of Cheng, Y., & Koh, S. Y. (2022). The ‘soft infrastructure’ of the Belt and Road Initiative: Imaginaries, affinities and subjectivities in Chinese transnational education. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 43(4), 250–269. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12420

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