Corridorizing Regional Globalization: The Reach and Impact of the China-Centric Rail-Led Geoeconomic Pathways across Europe and Asia

As globalization has partially retreated since the Great Recession of 2008–9, it has taken on an increasingly regionalizing form and force, with both integrating and fragmenting consequences. By advancing six large-scale economic corridors, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has unleashed a round of regionalizing globalization by corridorizing local and translocal urban and economic development along large-scale China-driven transport projects. In this chapter, I first conceptualize economic corridorization as a new round of globalization from below that enriches and advances the discourse on globalization. Then I trace and explore the cross-border geoeconomic pathways shaped by China-driven, rail-led regional economic corridors, through the paired cases of the China-Europe Freight Train and the China-Laos Railway. The analysis focuses on how logistics and trade flows along these rail-enabled corridors foster new translocal economic ties, industrial restructuring, redistributes consumption power, and thus fosters regional globalization from the middle and below. The chapter concludes on how this type of corridorized regionalization reterritorializes the extant paths of globalization and creates new economic pathways of globalization.