In November 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced
that China would contribute $40 billion to investing in a new Silk
Road to "break the connectivity bottleneck” in Asia." In December
2014, a freight train choo-chooed from Yiwu, in coastal China, to
Madrid, Spain in 21 days - the longest ever single freight train
journey. Yet what are we to make of all of Beijing's investments in
transportation infrastructure, which have occasionally been called a
"Chinese Marshall Plan"? More than just describing Chinese plans which
may or may not ever materialize, in this workshop, we will seek to
understand how China uses its normative power to create a space
friendly to Chinese investments in Central Asia. An understanding of
Chinese strategy in Central Asia can also help contextualize the
country's discourses and investments in other parts of the world from
Africa to Central America, where plans for a Nicaragua Canal have
recently attracted much attention.