Soft Power ‘Silky Alliances’: An Analysis of China’s One Belt One Road (OBAR) through Arts and Culture

This paper analyses the use of arts and culture as China’s soft power agents in the context of the One Belt One Road (OBAR) initiative. OBAR is a centrepiece in Xi Jinping’s foreign policy strategy for China to assume a more significant leadership role in global affairs. It includes infrastructure investments like ports, railroads, airports, roads, and dams to strengthen linkages and collaboration among the around hundred and fifty participating countries. While generally well-received by those involved, OBAR has met, almost from the start, scepticism from those who question its colossal financial borrowing schemes and the environmental damage caused by some projects. To offset criticism, China devised a series of narratives that assist in promoting the project internationally. The most recurrent of them emphasises the linkages between OBAR and the legendary ancient Silk Roads, a network of overland and maritime routes that connected large parts of Eurasia for hundreds of years, projecting immediacy and continuity and portraying them as seemingly overlapping realities. This paper investigates the roles played by arts and culture in the development of those narratives, and in particular, those entrusted by China to ‘the alliances’ (联盟), a succession of recent endeavours in various arts and cultural domains, from film and performing arts to museums and literature. As ‘cement’ bridges connecting East and West (and beyond) are fast being built, arts and cultural exchanges are tasked to construct symbolic ones, “bridges of friendship” (友谊之桥), that can ‘silken’ the geopolitics and strategies behind OBAR.