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The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of how markets are constituted and organized by foregrounding an anthropological focus on hospitality. Drawing on ethnographic insights from the gemstone market in China's Yunnan province, I argue that the use of online retail platforms has radically transformed social relations among traders, retailers, and customers. Despite such changes, and the seeming demise of 'hosting' as a central aspect of trading practices, hospitality remains critical to how business transactions are conducted. In particular, I demonstrate that hosting is highly productive of attachments between traders and customers, as well as certain places and products. The article concludes that hospitality is located in--and an essential element of--the 'market'. Keywords: China, e-commerce, guanxi, hospitality, hosting, live streaming, market, platformization, Gift relations and practices of hospitality have been key objects of study for anthropologists interested in the making and managing of networks of mutual assistance in China. Usually framed in [...]

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The rewilding of Alpine landscapes has often triggered the expansion of wildlife populations and the 'return' of previously near extinct species. Among those, the wolf has generated much debate and is a frequent object of contention between mountain communities and environmentalist groups. This paper aims to reorient such polarising debate by foregrounding multispecies entanglements through the experience of wildlife hunters in an Italian Alpine valley. In doing so, I show that the core issue lies in socioeconomic ruptures and the ongoing disenfranchisement of mountain communities, rather than with rewilding per se. To this end, I argue, the return of 'wild' animals becomes contentious not because of the threatening or formidable nature of such creatures; but rather because it signifies the abandonment of the mountain, connoting a process that equates to the ultimate un-domestication of a familiar space – a point of no return for mountain communities' social and cultural livelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs, has turned thousands of hectares of forests into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities and displaced persons relying on these lands for their livelihoods and refuge. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/KIA), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the more spectacular politics of the grand infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in this region. Moving across plantation sites, armed bases and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and farmers, the paper explores how plantations have transformed not only environmental space but also social-political dynamics of Kachin State in ways, we argue, that are more difficult to reverse than previous or ongoing military territorialization. In doing so, we aim to localize and contextualize the plantation as a key force rapidly transforming Asian borderworlds, over which broader socio-political struggles, environmental transformations, nature loss, connectivity and developmental become imbricated with bordering space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey. On the edge: Life along the Russia-China border. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]