Aligning Geographies, Past and Present

These videos are examples of a fascinating phenomenon, whereby media companies outside China are propagating and stabilizing a particular story of the Silk Roads, “old” and “new”. In the case of the Maritime Silk Road, I looked into how the term has come into circulation, discovering that it begins to gain currency at the end of the Cold War. There remains very little consensus as to what the term means, or what precisely it refers to. Despite this, since the launch of Belt and Road countless media reports have popularized the (Maritime) Silk Road - reducing complex historical processes and events, spanning many centuries into a simple story, with enticing infographics depicting singular trade routes sweeping between continents.

To tell the story of grand ambition and a changing world of business, such accounts present/distort/select/invent histories of regional trade and connection to make them align with the events of today. Belt and Road is re-writing history in more ways than one, and in the popular imagination BBC World, Russia Today, National Geographic and the Singapore based Channel News Asia are among those crafting China-centric depictions of transregional connectivities, past, present and future. Many other examples can be found online.