Bo Li1, Priyanka Sunder, A/Prof Amy King, Wenting He
1Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Bo Li is a PhD candidate at ANU. His research expertise includes China’s practices and ideas about sovereign debt management, particularly focusing on the evolving relationship between China’s overseas lending activities and the international debt architecture. Prior to his studies at ANU, Bo earned an MSc in International Political Economy (Research) from the London School of Economics. He has worked as a research assistant at the Institute of World Economics & Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Currently, Bo serves as a research assistant for How China Shapes the International Economic Order, led by A/Professor Amy King.
Abstract:
Current debates on the infrastructure-influence nexus predominantly view infrastructure as a static outcome of development financing, emphasising how completed projects can be leveraged to extract favourable geopolitical influence—illustrated most notably by the ‘debt-trap’ narrative in China’s overseas lending context. However, such perspectives often overlook the distinct power asymmetries embedded at each stage of the infrastructure life cycle, serving various political and economic purposes for the actors involved. This paper uses the case of China’s global infrastructure initiatives to delve into the agency of infrastructure beyond the financial forces that construct it. We argue that China’s infrastructure projects, while often initiated and officially framed as politically neutral endeavours driven by commercial interests and the norm of non-interference, inherently embed political influence during the project contracting, design, construction, operation, and maintenance phases. Asymmetrical political power relations and structural dependency are ingrained within infrastructure projects from the outset, thereby reshaping the economic and political interests of recipient countries. Moreover, these ostensibly technical and economistic processes tend to become re-politicised in later stages, especially when debt crises and normative concerns—such as accountability, transparency, and environmental and social impacts—emerge. While unequal power and structural dependence have been a feature of multilateral development bank infrastructure financing for decades, China’s emergence as the world’s leading sovereign lender has more prominently exposed these latent power dynamics to open contestation.