The One Belt One Road Initiative: Reintegrating Africa and the Middle East into China’s System of Accumulation

Abstract

Justin van der Merwe adopts a historical-geographical materialist approach to illustrate how China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative can be understood as part of a broader system of accumulation based on the government–business–media (GBM) complex. The analysis follows a critical rewriting of China’s regional and transnational relations with special attention paid to its involvement in Africa and the Middle East. This chapter concludes that the OBOR initiative is an opportunity to reintegrate Africa and the Middle East into China’s system of accumulation, arguably as a countermeasure or an alternative system to the dominant Western-led system of accumulation.