Silk Road diplomacy in the 21st century
The Silk Road is known as a network of trade routes linking regions in the East and West, stretching from the Korean peninsula and Japan to the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2013, China has been ‘reviving’ the invented history of the Silk Road and is remapping international affairs through its Belt and Road Initiative. ‘Belt’ references land routes and ‘Road’ references maritime routes.
The Belt and Road Initiative is a series of ongoing Chinese foreign policies and ideas around trade, connectivity, cultural exchange and diplomacy, infrastructure, logistics and technological exchange between Europe and Asia. It involves the investment and development of infrastructure across around 70 countries in the region and beyond.
The Silk Road, indicating land and maritime routes
In 2017 China launched the Health Silk Road, an initiative that revolved around conferences and various forms of bilateral cooperation spanning the advancement of medical science, wellbeing and traditional Chinese medicine. In the wake of Covid-19, China stepped up its investment in the Health Silk Road, developing cooperation platforms across more than eighty countries.
Through its cultural policies, Belt and Road also represents an attempt to build stability across the region. Cultural, trade and technological connections that span from centuries ago are being used as narratives to foster diplomatic and trade relations today. It is also leading to new forms of cooperation in the cultural policy sector: museums; conservation; urban planning; tourism infrastructure and across the digital humanities.
The Silk Road story is being used as a narrative to locate China at the centre of world affairs, past present and future.
Shaping the future
While many academics and media focus on the geoeconomic and geopolitical dimensions of the Belt and Road Initiative, Professor Tim Winter from the UWA School of Social Sciences is taking an approach that connects culture, history and international relations.
Geocultural Power a book by Tim Winter
Over the past 15 years, he has developed the concept of heritage diplomacy and in 2019 published his book: Geocultural Power: China’s quest to revive the silk roads for the twenty-first century. His knowledge of the political drivers of heritage preservation and twenty-first century diplomacy are highly regarded internationally and his work is now being applied to the complicated futures of the Belt and Road Initiative.
His book and website Silk Road Futures are challenging academics, cultural policy makers, media and government bodies in the region and organisations such as UNESCO to develop new ways of thinking about diplomacy and how culture and competition are used for political gain in the 21st century.
Research objectives:
- To understand how history and culture are being used within international cooperation and the consequences of that.
- To understand how the politics of cooperation constructs new forms of dependency and possibilities for smaller countries to cooperate on the international stage.
In this revival of the Silk Roads for the 21st century there are a multitude of social and cultural implications.
China will undoubtedly look to rebuild ‘p2p’ connectivities in a post-Covid 19 world, and Prof Winter anticipates the Health Silk Road will play a critical role in structuring multiple strands of diplomacy and cooperation for a so-called ‘shared future’.
The legacy of the Silk Road includes an array of material culture
Mapping the routes of connection
Both UNESCO and the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) recognise the need to give greater attention to the historical and cultural connections of the overland Silk Road. This legacy includes an array of movable and immovable material culture, including monasteries, post houses, forts, cave temples, Buddhist pagodas, tombs, textiles, documents, leather goods, and ceramics.
Funded by the Australian Research Council and using the Getty Conservation Institute Arches software, Professor Winter and his team are building a comprehensive international standards database for the mapping of cultural infrastructure projects.
Maritime Silk Road Ports and Heritage sites
The online system will be provided to UNESCO on completion and is designed for use by governments within Belt and Road countries as a predictive modelling tool to help them understand:
- tourism pressures that are likely to unfold in their region; and
- infrastructure pressures facing their historical sites due to development.
It will help UNESCO to anticipate the future pressures and infrastructure projects that are likely to impact the cultural and historical landscapes located across Central Asia and through Southeast Asia associated with the Silk Road, as well as inform policy around writing the histories of these places and world heritage nominations over the coming decade.
For Central Asia, this now creates a platform by which these regions can become part of world history in a way they haven’t in the past.
Maritime Silk Road tourism
The Belt and Road Initiative is provoking interest among countries on different forms of connected histories, including maritime connections that have existed historically between them. The UWA team, along with a number of universities and organisations around the region are working with UNESCO to provide leadership through expert meetings.
A 2019 UNWTO report identified a range of opportunities: maritime heritage attractions, cruise tourism and land based services, for locations situated along a “Maritime Silk Road” that stretches across the East and South China Sea and Indian Ocean regions. It also recognised the growing Chinese tourist market in this space.
Rapid growth in Silk Road tourism places enormous pressures on coastal cities and historic coastal cities right across the Belt and Road region.
Professor Winter has extracted port locations, both current and under development from the report and mapped these alongside the key cultural/heritage sites that are expected to foster growth in this sector.
The knowledge database will inform policy makers and bodies such as the UNWTO about:
- the economic and environmental significance of rapid growth in tourism for Southeast Asia.
- how to avoid mistakes made in busy Mediterranean ports. In the period 2012 – 2016, the Chinese cruise-ship market grew at a rate of 76% per year, reaching 2.1 million passengers by 2016. In 2017 more than 4 million passengers cruised around Asia making 7,200 port calls.
Around 140 million Chinese trips are made outbound every year, but only 13% of the Chinese population have a passport, and these figures are expected to double over the next 10 years.
Maritime Silk Road cruise tours are becoming more popular
Preserving the past
From the mid 2000’s, the Chinese government had dramatically increased its aid to Belt and Road countries including Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia and Myanmar, which previously relied heavily on ‘Western’ aid. Now, China is expanding their cultural and heritage conservation initiatives to countries in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Egypt, Greece and beyond.
Many of the infrastructure and development projects are located near cultural archaeological sites. The difficulty lies in anticipating the resulting developmental pressures at these locations from infrastructure projects.
Belt and Road and the infrastructure that’s being rolled out causes enormous challenges for archaeological and cultural sites that are now becoming identified as Silk Road landscapes and Silk Road cities.
The UNESCO World Heritage Centre has been working with the Chinese Government on a strategy for nomination to the World Heritage List, for the cultural properties along the Silk Road. In 2014, a study produced by UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) identified up to 550 historic settlements, archaeological sites and structures across the region associated with the Silk Road.
Professor Winter works closely with UNESCO and their agencies, delivering a number of publications and reports on heritage conservation and world heritage policy. He has been invited to participate at UNESCO regional workshops and to give talks internationally, including in China, where he advises against making the same mistakes made by Europeans in the 19th century around civilization, and in recognising and maintaining the cultures of countries joining the Initiative.
The ICOMOS General Assembly 2020 is themed Shared Cultures – Shared Heritage – Shared Responsibility. Professor Winter will be presenting at GA2020. He has also been invited to chair a group of international experts at a workshop ahead of the GA2020. There delegates will have an opportunity to discuss Maritime Asia and cultural policy platforms directly with ICOMOS.
For UNESCO, the UWA database will serve as a platform for world heritage nominations. It will also provide ICOMOS with a sense of how to write connected histories and preserve heritage conservation in a way that does not distort histories across the Indian Ocean and East Asian Seas.
The Silk Road
A future for the Belt and Road
The Belt and Road Initiative represents a significant platform for preserving and restoring the cultural past across a number of countries. Through his work with UNESCO and their agencies, Professor Tim Winter is introducing the idea of heritage and cultural diplomacy to the conversation. His work is helping to preserve the material past in countries and locations that desperately need resources and assistance.
International relations has for the past 20 years, focussed on the ‘clash of civilizations’. What China is trying to do is shift that to a ‘dialogue of civilizations’.
The surgeon’s sense of touch