Documenting China’s Borderlands – Episode 8: Arteries of Power

From the National Bureau of Asian Research, an Asia Insight miniseries exploring the geostrategic significance of China’s borderlands, led by Nadège Rolland, Distinguished Fellow for China Studies at NBR.

Episode Eight: Arteries of Power

This eighth episode of the Borderlands podcast miniseries explores one of the most visible manifestations of China’s growing engagement with its neighbors—infrastructure development—and considers whether transportation, telecommunication, and energy infrastructure function not just as conduits to transfer people and goods but also as channels of state influence and generators of strategic advantages.

With Jessica C. Liao (U.S. Army War College), Timothy S. Oakes (University of Colorado Boulder), and Shinji Yamaguchi (Japan National Institute for Defense Studies).

Materials cited or referenced in the recording

• Richard Louis Edmonds, “The Legacy of Sun Yat-sen’s Railway Plans,” China Quarterly, no. 111 (1987).
• Thomas Bird, “Tracing the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 10, 2020.
• Jean-François Rousseau, “An Imperial Railway Failure: The Indochina-Yunnan Railway, Journal of Transport History 35, no.1 (2014).
• "习近平在“加强互联互通伙伴关系”东道主伙伴对话会上的讲话" [Xi Jinping Speech at the Dialogue on Strengthening Connectivity Partnership] November 8, 2014, https://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2014-11/08/c_127192119.htm.
• Shinji Yamaguchi, “Creating ‘Facts on the Mountains’: China’s Gray Zone Playbook in the Himalayas,” Institute for Security and Development Policy, Issue Brief, August 29, 2025.
• Galen Murton, “Strategic Spaces of the Sino-Nepali Borderlands: Making and Breaking Trans-Himalayan Trade Relations,” NBR, Borderlands Project, April 15, 2026, https://strategicspace.nbr.org/strategic-spaces-of-the-sino-nepali-borderlands-making-and-breaking-trans-himalayan-trade-relations.
• “President Xi Jinping: Why I Proposed the Belt and Road,” CGTN, May 12, 2017, https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d596a4d31677a4d/index.html.

Additional Recommended Readings

• Jessica C. Liao and Zenel Garcia, “How China Reinvented the BRI,” Foreign Policy, April 3, 2026.
• Jessica C. Liao and Zenel Garcia, “China Is Squeezing Southeast Asia,” Foreign Affairs, March 24, 2026.
• Timothy S. Oakes, “The National New Area as an Infrastructure Space: Urbanization and the New Regime of Circulation in China,” China Quarterly, no. 255 (2023).
• Timothy S. Oakes, “Global China and Infrastructure Power: The Technopolitics of the ‘China Model’ of Development’,” Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs 10, no. 85 (2024).
• Cai Penghong, 蔡鹏鸿, “互联互通战略与中国国家安全——基于地缘政治视角的互联互通” [The Connectivity Strategy and China’s National Security—Connectivity from a Geopolitical Perspective], Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, August 26, 2015.
• Mao Weizhun 毛维准 and Ma Yunfei马赟菲 ,“互联互通的地缘政治： 大国基础设施竞争的行为逻辑” [The Geopolitics of Connectivity: The Behavioral Logic of Great Power Infrastructure Competition,” Foreign Affairs Review 5 (2024).