Nomadic Imaginaries and Chinese Globalization

How might an understanding of the complex relations surrounding the ancient Silk Road inform our understanding of large-scale infrastructures of today?

The ancient Silk Road was a network of trade routes connecting China, Central Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and the Roman Empire. It was the driver for one of the first waves of globalization in history.

The Silk Road facilitated the exchange of goods and merchandise, but also enabled a widespread transmission of knowledge, ideas, cultures, and beliefs. It was a decentralized system with no absolute center. Neighboring nations entered tributary relations with China, acknowledging its dominant position and sending envoys with gifts to the Chinese emperor each year.

This loose system of international relations was regulated by the cosmological system of tianxia (天下), meaning “all under heaven,” which is often associated with the Confucian world order. Tianxia has become the focus of the recent debate in scholarship and public discourse in China in recent years.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an attempt to revive connections along the ancient Silk Road. It is the embodiment of the Chinese vision of globalization in the twenty-first century.

Some commentators believe that the principles of historical tianxia can become a prototype for an alternative model of international relations within the BRI framework.

You Mi, a Beijing-born curator, researcher, and faculty member at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne explores how understanding the complex relations surrounding the ancient Silk Road may inform our understanding of large-scale infrastructures of today. Her long-term research and curatorial projects take the Silk Road as a figuration for anti-nationalist, de-centralized and nomadic imageries. She fundamentally questions the viability of the historical concept of tianxia being used as the underlying principle for an alternative model for international relations today.

Strelka Mag’s Yulia Gromova spoke to You Mi to discover to what extent the old Chinese Empire and its tributary system might inform BRI operations.

Yulia Gromova: Can you explain the different ways of understanding the Silk Road?

You Mi: What really dictates the imagination of the Silk Road is that you first have to have a map of the world in order to project your understanding of this network —the network in which things and peoples moved. This is a spatialized understanding of the Silk Road.

This approach can be very limiting, especially when we think about what it is today, when we have extremely demarcated borders between nation states, each claiming its own version and parceling out a portion of the Silk Road.

In my own artistic research and curatorial work, I approach the Silk Road in a more poetic and metaphysical way. It does not have to follow this spatialized dictation of the imagination. Rather, if we introduce the element of time, for example, you can see how the Silk Road stands for continual transformations and mutations of different spheres of culture, and of religious, linguistic, and life practices. I am more interested in this long-term mutation of the Silk Road.

YG: What are the specifics of the nomadic relationship to space?

YM: If you think about the historical nomadic pastoralists, the key feature was that there was a very different understanding of ownership.

There was no need for them to own, demarcate, or distribute the land like agrarian cultures needed to do. The nomads would move according to the season—according to the needs of the livestock that they raised. They didn’t need to accumulate surplus value, because they couldn’t quite make use of it.

There are quite interesting studies on why, when scientific and technological advancements were in place, the nomads actually didn’t need to make use of them. For example, in the Arab Peninsula, camels were used consistently until the modern era, even though people had already invented wheels two or three millennia ago. It's because there was simply no need to speed up or to scale up the caravan. This aspect of moderation is very different from sedentary cultures.

Although, I have to say, some forms of surplus did exist; it was not a completely self-sustained system. The nomads had interacted with the outside through trade, so the rulers needed to accrue some surplus—valuables which would be distributed among the loyal circle.

So, that is the dry historical or anthropological take on the nomadic peoples.

If we take it into a more speculative or more philosophical rhyme, we can derive different cultural techniques from the nomadic peoples. From this lack of ownership, we can claim a custodianship to the ecological system. In this case, you’re not focused on owning land or livestock, but instead you exist in interdependence with all of these entities—the livestock, the forest, the pastures, the rivers, the animals. It can also be scaled down to a microscale, by looking at minerals and fluids.

My own approach to the Silk Road and nomadism, as a philosophy, is not so much looking at anthropological studies as it is expanding them into this rhyme, where you can speculate and ask questions: “What could this custodianship mean for us today? Can we derive different legal codes based not on individuals and not on personhood and not on discrete entities, but based on an inter-relational matrix or network?”

YG: How can an understanding of nomadic forms of organization inform our understanding of large-scale infrastructures, such as the BRI?

YM: Anybody studying nomadology as a philosophy cannot do without mentioning, of course, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who wrote a chapter called “Nomadology” in their very famous book A Thousand Plateaus. There are a few important points there that correspond with my own experience of traveling in and studying Central Asia.

In their version, the nomadic society is pitted against the sedentary society. In the sedentary society we distribute land, whereas for the nomads, they’re distributed in space.

In our culture we first set the points and then we try to connect the points by lines. But for the nomads it’s not points first; points are rather subordinated to the lines. For them, mobility—the movements that constitute the lines—is of primary importance. And then the points just temporarily emerge on those lines.

Using this scheme of the points and lines, you can see how the infrastructure projects of the BRI are built on a generic understanding of space. You have the points—the ports, the oil or gas fields in various nations—and then you try to connect them in ways that are economically sensible or geopolitically favorable to your condition.

The BRI in general, as an organizing mechanism of the global supply chain, drives towards the maximization of productivity. And that follows a specific imagination of what infrastructure and production can mean, as opposed to what we spoke about earlier in terms of moderation in surplus.

YG: How, in your view, does capitalism re-configure networks?

YM: Capitalism is and has always been an embodiment of networked forms of organization. If you think about Friedrich Hayek’s “invisible hand”—how supply and demand can be balanced, how decentralized forms of knowledge can be somehow mediated by this mechanism—that’s already a decentralized, networked form of organization.

But networks themselves are neutral; they are not necessarily good or bad. Just having a centralized network doesn’t mean that it’s inherently bad, or that it leads to a tyranny of centralized power. And simply having a decentralized network doesn’t mean that you’re on the moral high ground.

Decentralized forms of organization have been with capitalism for a long time. And it really depends on us to program it and to insert it with social and cultural meanings. With the decentralized network, for example, you also had the Chilean or Soviet cybernetic projects that aimed to manage the socialist economy, both of which failed for various reasons. But, nevertheless, you can see how competing ideological foundations can utilize the same form of network.

We’re now living in between the decentralization and recentralization of networks. What used to be a flat space of freedom back when the internet was invented is now increasingly being re-centralized around big tech companies.

And also regarding free trade—a bedrock of late capitalism—we see, strangely, a re-emergence of borders and tariff wars or trade wars. All of these protectionist mechanisms are not new; we had them before the World Wars in the US, Germany, and Japan, and before that in the UK to protect what were then infant domestic markets. So protectionism is not new, but it is increasingly creating choke points in this decentralized network of capitalism today. What this might lead to is clusters of networks—the recently signed RCEP is an example of it.

YG: How can we find points of resistance within these post-capitalist forms of organizations?

YM: First, we have to understand where we are, and not be naive about any particular form of networks. Then we have to understand the coexistence and the mutations of all these networks. Only then can we try to insert ourselves somewhere and see if resistance is possible.

Anti-globalist movements developed in recent decades are going off the grid from this network. There have been—for a long time, but increasingly so—community economies with local organizations in a supplementary relation to the markets at large. The crucial point is to network these communitarian practices and enable translocal exchange, where the money-intermediary can be redesigned.

I’m not taking a simple stance between this anti-globalist movement and globalization, because I did grow up in a time when China slowly opened itself up to globalization. If you remember that—having the ugliest toys or not having anything at all when you were young—then you know what globalization brings, not just in terms of commodities but also in terms of ideas and worldviews.

Now it seems globalization is running out of steam. In the COVID-19 crisis we see this kind of going back or scaling down to a certain older network happening by necessity. For instance, during the pandemic, the Filipino government needed to roll out online learning for a large population that has no access to the internet. They instead utilized old infrastructures like radio. And if you look back to community radio networks in the region in the 1990s, they really contributed to community lives by encouraging community participation and co-creation.

I find these moments quite interesting, as they point in a different way than teleological development in terms of technology. We can encourage all these different forms or networks to coexist.

YG: How is the concept of tianxia different from the Western understanding of sovereignty?

YM: Tianxia is many things. Literally, it means “everything under heaven” and it’s an abstract world system in which there’s a clear hierarchy between the Chinese Empire, which is supposed to be at the center of “everything under heaven,” while the other countries on the periphery would enter into a tributary relationship with China in exchange for goods, symbolic titles, and military protection.

Theoretically and symbolically, it is an unequal system, with China being at the top of the hierarchy. Yet in practice, the other polities would enjoy different degrees of material gains, from lavish gifts to trading along the tributary routes.

In contrast, the European or the Westphalian model is based on, at least in theory, equality between states. But in practice, they were territorially expansionist and economically exploitative. That led to colonialism of European nation states.

We’re really looking at different forms of imperialisms in history—the European imperialism based on nation states, versus the old imperialism of China. And today we’re looking at neo-imperialism of nation states again, at a much larger scale.

YG: The popular view in China is that tianxia can become an alternative political ideology for transforming the current international system. What would be the implications of that?

YM: There are a few Chinese and non-Chinese scholars working on this, Zhao Tingyang being one of the better known proponents.

It gets tricky when you make a case for today’s China with the case of the historical Chinese Empire, as if saying “because tianxia was a functional system which managed to keep regional peace and allowed for everybody to prosper, whatever we do today under the name and in the form of tianxia would achieve the same.”

Zhao Tingyang and a few other scholars argue for tianxia as an ideal form of global governance, beyond the narrow understanding of international politics with a much larger goal of pursuing harmony and the common wellbeing of all peoples.

There are a lot of conceptual slippages and pitfalls in this, as scholars like Cai Menghan have shown. Suffice to say that the historical model was more about an idealized world order than describing actual conditions.

To apply it to today’s global politics is even trickier—it took us so much pain to arrive at a world with institutions that more or less observe law and order. It may seem to the scholars that tianxia could exist as a cultural philosophical idea, exerting certain soft power, but soft power never comes without hard power. Think of American imperialism and the cultural exports that went with it.

YG: Is the BRI an updated version of colonialism?

YM: That touches on the hard power side of things. The financing of the BRI infrastructures has happened mostly through Chinese state-backed banks in the form of loans. Many critics are focused on how this financing presents the risk of a “debt trap.” If the countries are unable to meet the repayment deadline and the debt defaults, they may need to concede certain assets to China in a debt-asset swap. This happened a few years ago with the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, which China holds on a 99 year lease.

But this is one of the few cases where defaulted debt actually led to a neocolonial concession. In this case the importance is rather in the military strategic role of the port than the debt itself.

In most cases of debt default, mainly in Africa, they were renegotiated and often resolved under favorable conditions to the borrowing countries.

Many of these arrangements don’t make financial or commercial sense, but show the pragmatic side of the BRI. It has to do with expanding political legitimacy—new rules, ideas, and institutions that represent Chinese ideas of global governance.

YG: Do you see any potential for the BRI to bring about positive social change for the populations of host countries?

YM: There are many critics who are categorically against this form of globalization happening at such speed and scale.

For example, when you build a highway across rural areas where there used to be only dirt roads, the villages in between the main nodal points don’t necessarily benefit from it, because the highway doesn’t actually bring traffic to the local village. Whereas with the dirt road, you have slower movements of goods and people, resulting in higher local transactions.

At the same time, there are also tangible benefits with globalization. The question is if it benefits only the elites, rather than the locals.

As we said earlier, different levels of networks of economic and social activities co-exist, and with them come creative ways of engaging with globalization on the low-end.

For example, there is the globalized smartphone market with Apple and Samsung, but then in Africa and parts of Asia, you have various low-end, no-name brands of smartphones, and they’re equally functional in helping people connect. People in those societies also hack tech systems to make better use of them in ways that people in higher income societies don’t tend to do.

I am very interested in how Seiche is trying to apply different legal systems within a modular program. So do you try to arrive at different understandings of citizenship and of legal systems?

YG: With the project in Khorgos, Seiche’s speculative proposal was to have a software that would help to synchronize different legal systems. The questions at stake were: “Can we tie citizenship not to a piece of land, but to a flow of goods? Can motility and mobility become the basis for defining citizenship? Can people that live along the BRI somehow gain traction in terms of being part of this flow?” We suggested a speculative interface and a legislative software that would help to connect various actors at different scales throughout different jurisdictions of the BRI.

YM: The citizenship aspect is really difficult to hack, as we're so accustomed to what it means. I started rethinking about it recently, prompted by a few developments. One is, of course, the Estonian e-citizenship, which is exactly, as you suggested, unbounded from a physical land. Until now, citizenship implies that we're born into a country and it comes with a certain package of rights and obligations, some better, some worse. But then what would it mean if we had to establish our own rights and obligations, depending on what we do and how we contribute to a society? So we would accrue more rights as we interact with society. This is a little bit connected to the Marxian notion of general intelligence and my own expansion of it into the question of social intelligence. How can we become once again more activated in the way we relate socially by way of citizenship? That's something that I'm really interested in.

YG: This can also tie to the Silk Road, where you needed to have certain cultural knowledge to be able to participate.

YM: Yeah. I think the dark side of what I just said is the potential pitfall of quantifying everything into certain metrics so that it becomes a crude meritocratic system—the more you prove yourself, the more citizenship rights you get. It shouldn't be like that. It should be something that's much more interpersonal or, as I said earlier, with the sort of accountability in nomadology. How can we introduce the nomadic element into legal codes? How can we write legal codes not based on discrete entities, but on interdependence and interrelations? And what if we can introduce that into citizenship questions?

YG: Yes—what could be another way, aside from marrying to gain citizenship?

YM: Yeah, another way that is less rigid and more dynamic and truly contributory. Like—I do something for nature, but I don't do it out of the idea that I'm ticking a box or I'm fulfilling a certain metric. And the more that I do, the more I become. We can also extend the idea of marriage to a bonding relation with other people and things, such as the environment, natural entities. With this, the more caring people become, the better the society becomes. These are ideas for a vague social program somewhere down the road, inspired by nomadology.

You Mi

Dr. You Mi is a curator, researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her long-term research and curatorial projects spin between the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic. She works with the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. Under this rubric, she has curated programs at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), and with Binna Choi, she is co-steering a research/curatorial project “Unmapping Eurasia” (2018-2021). At the same time, her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on “actionable speculations”, articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fi-a-thon “Sci-(no)-Fi” at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her function as chair of committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum. She is one of the curators of the 13thShanghai Biennale (2020-2021).

Her academic interests are in media theory and performance philosophy, science and technology studies, as well as new and historical materialism. She is fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), member of the Academy of Arts of the World(Cologne), and serves as director of Arthub (Shanghai) and advisor to Institute for Provocation(Beijing).