2025/12/22 by Davide Giacomo Zoppolato, Filippo Boni · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Belt and Road Initiative #China's Global Influence and Migration #China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations
paper · doi:10.1080/15387216.2025.2597822
openalex publication_date 2025/12/22 · openalex created_date 2025/12/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
The emphasis on “discourse power” and “telling the China story” has been central to China’s international engagement over the past decade. While existing scholarship has critically examined the projection of China’s narratives, scant attention has been paid to how these narratives are contested, adapted, or fragmented across scales and audiences in partner countries. By deploying Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, specifically its mechanisms of doxa, misrecognition, and illusio, the study develops a model to interrogate how China’s narratives on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project, are projected and reconfigured within localized political and media ecosystems. Drawing on an original dataset of 6,133 articles in Chinese, Urdu, and English , the mixed-methods analysis reveals tensions between national elites’ alignment with BRI optimism and provincial actors’ critical scrutiny of distributive inequities and risks. These findings contribute to debates on global narrative diffusion by demonstrating how symbolic power operates unevenly across scales and places. Our study further highlights the methodological necessity of multiscalar and multilingual analysis to unpack the politics of development narratives, offering a replicable framework for interrogating discourse power.