From infrastructure space to network power: Chinese cross-border collaborative Special Economic Zones in Southeast Asia

Abstract

There is a growing scholarly attention to mega cross-border infrastructural projects in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through collaborative Special Economic Zones (SEZs). While existing literature has explored relationships between special zones, usually produced through preferential economic policies, and the outside region, few studies take a view beyond the static demarcation of SEZs. This paper utilizes network power framework through the lens of infrastructuralization to investigate the changing and diversified emphasis of China’s application of the SEZ model. It delves into the development processes of the China-invested Sihanoukville SEZ in Cambodia and the Malaysia-China Kuantan Industrial Park in Malaysia. The introduction of the Shenzhen model in the Sihanoukville SEZ brings in the idea and practice of administrative reconfiguration, and the zone becomes a constitutive part of the infrastructure that channels the planning codes into Cambodia. In comparison, with limited space for overseas developers, the zone in Malaysia serves as the infrastructure to secure logistics alternatives in the transnational production network. By investigating the SEZs' multi-faceted process of infrastructuralization, we argue that the SEZs constitute a key hub of the interactive networks and simultaneously an integral part of the channel for cross-border circulation of capital, people, ideas, technical standards, and practices. By transcending conventional territorial boundaries and integrating zoning codes with logistical infrastructures, China has effectively turned SEZs into nodes of both domestic urbanization and transnational power network entanglements. The Chinese model demonstrates the potential of zones to operate beyond enclave logics and instead function as strategic assemblage that rewrite state-market relations.