Dr. Galen Murton (James Madison University)

This talk examining China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Nepal shows how BRI programs across the trans-Himalaya region reflect a new phase of Sino-Nepali geopolitics which I conceptualize as ‘infrastructural relations.’ While these infrastructural relations between Beijing and Kathmandu are routinely framed at geopolitical scales, it is also evident that they operate at personal and bodily levels. That is, attention to BRI activities in Nepal’s borderland regions, where Tibetan religious and linguistic practices proliferate, reveals that ethnographic anxieties also motivate China’s international infrastructure development agenda. Highlighting the cultural dimensions often hidden within broader geopolitical discourse on the BRI in Nepal, I unpack how new configurations of bilateral energy, transport, and security collaboration between Nepal and China also index a new model of development with Chinese characteristics.