Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative frames China’s engagement with the world through trade and diplomacy. Hailed as a twenty-first century Silk Road, the initiative connects China to its trading partners across land and sea. Though it also serves as an engagement with the world at large, including ordinary citizens, among whom the readers of the anglophone China Daily. On the 5th of December 2019, this newspaper printed one of many “Public Interest Ads” promoting its logistical connection to the world as a driver of “Peace and Cooperation”. This article analyses the visual depiction of two mirrored ships on the advertisement. First, by reflecting on the tension between past and present depicted through an analysis of the image as an independent cultural item. Second, by contextualising the image and its meaning in the broader, considering political and ecocritical aspects of this image. In doing so, the article sheds light on the Barthesian mythology that underpins the visual connection between past and present – with an eye on the future.
The notion of medium is very broad, and for that reason the meaning of its message is always complex and multiple as well. According to Marshall McLuhan the notion of medium refers to any tool or instrument that changes our relationship to the world. The Toronto School his work represents explicitly claims that it is not possible to distinguish between media studies and the study of communication networks, be they “physical” (routes, roads, postal system) or “electronic” (telegraph, telephone, world wide web). More recently, Ned Rossiter explored the intricate connections and overlaps between the logics that govern digital media and physical logistics infrastructures. While clear overlaps exist across time and media, the emergence of a new medium triggers change. Though what this change means is not always immediately given, if only because we never experience the new medium in itself: we enter the future by looking backwards, following the “rear window” metaphor coined by McLuhan. Through this window, we think through change backward, by framing change and innovation in relation to its newly obsolete or inferior predecessor: the first trains were carriages without horses, cinema was moving photography, television was radio-cum-images, for instance.
Advertisement is one of the many ways we have at our disposal to try to master this complexity (it is not the only one: legal systems and narrative fiction are no less important social techniques of making sense of the world that surrounds us). Yet like any other message, advertisements can be misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted, or simply missed, when one does not notice them at all. Advertisements therefore combine two ways of controlling their meaning. Quantitatively speaking, they aspire to a certain form of ubiquity (their objective is to be noticed by the audience that is considered relevant and this generally supposes a combination of various communication channels). Qualitatively speaking, they will try to encode their meaning in more than one way, both by making it as explicit as possible and by implicitly stressing this meaning with the help of rhetorical techniques and devices. Elaborating a good understanding of the rhetoric of advertisements is a necessary task of modern media studies, according to McLuhan. His first book, The Mechanical Bride, was not only a study of popular culture via the critical close-reading of mass media visual advertisements for consumer goods, but also an attempt to build a shelter against what he called “media fall out” –and yes, the mechanical bride is a metaphor of … the car.
The “Public Interest Ad” on The Belt and Road Initiative of the Chinese government offers a good opportunity to examine some of these elements, since it combines almost all of them in one single “message”: it is a communication about communication, it displays a connection between old and new, and it relies on a careful intertwining of visual and verbal elements. The image is an example of the Chinese state blurring the lines between “soft” propaganda, advertisement, and public relations.
Yet to read the mere advertisement cannot suffice. To really make sense of what is going on in this advertisement, a contextual analysis is needed as well. For this reason, our analysis will proceed in two steps. First, we will make some comments on the advertisement as an independent cultural text. Second, we will open this internal analysis to a broader frame, considering political and ecocritical aspects of this image.
In 1981 French writer Georges Perec published a text with the English title “Still Life/Style Leave”. It is the description of all objects on his desk, which ends with a mention of the sheet of paper on which he just finished this description, after which he quotes in full length the text we just read. Yet this second half of the text, at first sight a literal repetition of the first part, contains a certain number of small but meaningful differences and the meaning of the piece lies in these tiny changes.
Perec’s piece is a verbal variation on an age-old technique: the use of a singular type of “false” mirror images to disclose the hidden meaning of what otherwise might have remained unnoticed. Certain shadows and other types of reflections are revealing traces, not only of some material presence (no smoke without fire), but also of a truth that can only be made visible through distortion. It is important to stress however that the function of this technique can never be reduced to a single use or meaning, for instance a warning against a certain danger (for instance when the shadow of a human character shows themselves in the form of a devil or a wolf) or an enhancement of some positive qualities (for instance when a human character is reflected as an angel, a saint, a superwoman, etc.).
Rhetorical devices can be used for more than one function, just as a rhetorical function can be fulfilled by more than one technique. It is possible to identify a certain number of rhetorical manoeuvres, but this description will never prove capable of defining the actual reception of the work, which will always remain bound by context. The image discussed – with text in English – was printed in China Daily, a newspaper that targets English speakers inside and outside China. While a “Chinese” reading of this images – and its hints to the unity of opposites as found in Chinese philosophy – could yield meaningful insights. In this article, we focus on how the image can be read outside of China.
The quasi symmetrical structure of the ad, divided in two nearly same-sized horizontal layers, is structured around three main objects or domains: the two ships, the two people who serve as figureheads, all but attached to the bows of the vessels (while they are anonymous, one can only assume the explorer is meant to be Zheng He, the 14th century Ming Dynasty maritime voyager), and the environments (water, land, sky). Across these domains, the inverted diptych displays a set of immediately readable transformations, which form a close-knit tapestry of intended significations.
The most central and significant element of the image is, at face value, the ship itself – or rather the two ships. Alongside the various modifications between the split representation, the visual and spatial stitching depicts two very different items: a modern containership and a traditional sailing vessel in the form of a bǎochuán, or treasure ship. The aim of the image is decidedly not to blur the boundaries between the “old” bǎochuán and the “new” containership, but to underline their analogy despite all their differences. By matching the two ships with the help of a mirror effect, the image strives to minimize what actually separates them.
At the same time, however, the visual representation also manages to build a comparison that turns to the advantage of the modern ship, whose features are not seen as disruptions, but as continuations or expansions of what is now no longer in use. The modern steel container ship emerges from the past as the “better” copy of wooden bǎochuán, with a characteristically Chinese “junk” rig, even if the design and rig of Zheng He’s fleet remains disputed. The equivalence between the two ships is therefore not to be considered in terms of identity: the old ship is not there to disclose a hidden truth, but to suggest the road that has been travelled ever since. This fundamental stance helps understand that the contemporary container ship is not just a technological update or innovation of the sail ship: it offers something new, which is also something better. This idea of remediation is visible in more than one regard.
The new ship is discernibly “bigger”, by virtue of a higher freeboard, than the old one –which also means that its transportation capacity is much superior to that of the sailing ship. It is also faster, one may argue, evoked by the two energizing white stripes that run along the whole side of the container ship and whose divergence when coming closer to the prow suggests a kind of taking off, as if the ship were rising up from the water as a plane. Interestingly, the matter of size is somewhat contentious. The bǎochuán used by Zheng He were, after all reportedly larger than any European ships until centuries later, even if evidence of the precise scale of the ships remains uncertain. Considering the relatively small loading capacity of the depicted container ship (relative to the largest present-day ships) – which we estimate to be about ten times smaller than the largest vessels in operation that can carry some twenty-four thousand twenty-foot boxes – the scale is off indeed. If anything, the sailing vessel should be larger.
The real contrast between the vessels lies in their appearance, rather than their scale. The newer (container) ship is dramatically colourful. Its Lego-like patchwork contrasts with the nearly monochrome, borderline dull, light brown colours of the sailing ship, which hardly makes any distinction between the colour of the hull and that of the sails. If colour connotes energy and joy, which is a plausible hypothesis, the move from old to new coincides here with a similar move from stasis to mobility – as well as from old age to youth.
The container ship suggests both greater playfulness (through its colour) and greater predictability. Its office-like tower and the containers arranged like Post-Its or a tightly-packed Gantt-chart evokes the neatly organised logistics that allows just-in-time delivery and its underpinning “lean” business logic, which shipping containers have come to connote. Even so, the modern ship provides a playful recombination of the underlying geometrical structure of the old ship: the sails of the latter obey a strict and here as well somewhat dull repetition of the same grid (her sails repeat the same pattern of almost identical quadrangles), whereas the corresponding part of the former exhibits a dynamic combination of various types of geometrical forms, the lively mixture of which is further reinforced by the strong contrast between the stacked containers (a grouping that seems to be more rigid than the soft grid-like structure of the sailing ship) and the almost chaotic but perfectly stabilized montage of squares, triangles, dots and lines –and this is of course an element that energetically breaks the grid structure in the lower part of the image.
The image figures a smooth, nearly seamless transition from nature to culture, that is from an environment where man (for both images suggest the presence of men, rather than humans) must account for the power of something that surrounds him to an environment that seems so much under control that it becomes invisible. In the representation of the sailing ship, the idea of wind is obviously present. Most clearly through the wind that curls the sails and lifts the cape of Zheng He, the figurehead. Perhaps quite ironically, only through the use of sails, but also through the fact that the vessel is sailing directly into the wind (more about that later).
In the image of the modern container ship, where containers fill the deck instead of sails, there is not the slightest hint at what actually drives the ship (we don’t see any power engine, much less exhaust fumes), as if it was moving all by itself (that is, by the mere energy of those who are in command of the vessel). Here as well, the progress from old to new is clear: modern ships are no longer hindered by the virtually negative power of natural elements (such as, to take opposite but similar examples, storm or calm, which both make it difficult to operate under sail) or the need for human labour to harness the power of the wind.
The move from nature to culture equally manifests in the metaphorical reading that is watermarked in the image of the two ships: the masts of the old ships resemble trees, the deck of the modern container ship resembles a medium-sized skyscraper city. This illustrates McLuhan’s “rear window”: the containership sails without sails, navigates without navigator, and moves containerized goods with automated machines, rather than “general cargo” – stowed in the hold bar hardworking stevedores. These shifts, tending to highlight the profound continuity of past and present. But not without establishing the superiority of today over yesterday, not to mention the implicit promise of a better tomorrow.
The continuity suggested in the image should not dissimulate a fundamental change, which may be overlooked by the overwhelming presence of smaller and larger items and units that stress the link between the old and the new. And the relationship between these two operations is far from neutral. It is not far-fetched to think that the multiplication of elements underlying the profound unity of past and present tends to curtail the effects of what is really disruptive.
What we see in the lower part of the mirrored image is a historical figure holding a ship’s telescope. In the upper part, we see a uniformed businessman with the suitcase. While they are both anonymous, in that they have name nor face, we know a great deal about the historical figure. The person depicted here is almost without a doubt Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty eunuch who lived between 1371 and 1433 and led maritime expeditions on behalf the Yongle Emperor (1360–1424), who took the throne in 1402.
The anonymity of the businessman may be deliberately symbolic. While Renminbi bills may now depict Mao Zedong, money – unlike currency – bears no name, nationality, creed, or class. Money, some argue, is merely a system of debt that relies on symbolic meaning to instil faith in the bearer that this debt will be serviced (Graeber 2014). The suit is to people what symbolism is to banknotes: a convention to maintain trust. That is, at least, the implicit promise of globalized capitalism, the rules of which China has bought into since acceding the World Trade Organization in December 2001 – albeit with “Chinese characteristics.”
Unsurprisingly, labour is not depicted, in either “past” or the “present.” We don’t see officers, ordinary seaman, longshoremen, crane operators, or pilots. All we see (and admire) are the figureheads who adorn the deck. While the two depicted people are not statues attached to the bows of their respective vessels, they might as well have been. They are nothing if not symbolic vestiges of China’s past and present maritime presence. But, once again, the image offers us a representation that accentuates the essential continuity between both, while at the same time refraining from insisting upon repetition only. Indeed, the new figurehead, comparable to the old as it may be, proves fundamentally superior. Chief in this regard are three characteristics.
The modern figurehead is, comparatively speaking, much smaller than the older one (not only because he occupies less space in the image but also because he is much smaller relative to the vessel he commands). This reduction does not mean that the modern figure is less important or powerful than the older one, quite the contrary: the larger the difference between the size of the figurehead and that of his vessel, the bigger the power of the former on the latter. The figurehead of the sailing bǎochuán is tall, but the efficiency of his action largely depends on the goodwill of nature and the necessarily large – though invisible – crew needed to set and trim the sails, whereas the modern businessman looks very small but reigns supreme over a large vessel.
The contour of the sail boat’s figurehead remain inside the visual limits of his ship, while the pointed arm and finger of the modern businessman seem on the verge of stepping out, of going beyond these limits –as if the prow of this new world in action were shifting from the boat to the human figure. Moreover, the fact that the old figurehead is using a ship’s telescope seems to hint at some unknown in front of him. The energetically stretched arm and finger of his contemporary equivalent demonstrate on the contrary that the territory that he is entering is already completely familiar (if not, the modern businessman would have replaced his suitcase by some geo-localizing tool, which obviously he is no longer in need of). Consequently, in the modern part of the representation, there is no longer any trace of a natural obstacle. The old figurehead who is sailing against the wind is also pushed backwards by the wind, as clearly shown by the bulging form of his coat. This is no longer the case with the modern businessman, who is shown in a back and forth swinging movement of his left and right arm, as if he were a marching soldier.
Although the modern figurehead is drawn in black and white – in order to highlight the hierarchical gap between the somewhat childish chromatic chaos of the ship and the seriousness of its commander? – unlike the old figurehead he is not seen in backlight, as a mere 2D profile figure, as flat as the sails that surround the representative of the Silk Road era. We have instead a dynamic mixture of black and white and, more importantly, figure and background. The sky that appears between the spread legs of the modern character become part of his image, as if he was appropriating the world that surrounds him.
The more the advertisement foregrounds the gradual shifts from old to new, from sail boat to container ship, the less we will notice the abyssal shift that is occurring under our noses: while the bǎochuán conceals cargo and commerce from the viewer, the image of the modern container ship is all about transportation of goods and thus of business and commerce. Even so, the container itself is no more revealing when it comes to the nature of the cargo than is the hold of the ship.
The key difference here is China’s take on history. Zheng He, or so the myth goes, merely traded and maintained diplomatic relations, unlike European seafarers who explored for domination, colonialism, slavery, and plunder. China’s message is rather that there is continuity between their claim to a benevolent past and the present (what China claims to want is ‘peace and cooperation’). The image of Zheng He, about whom little is known, more commonly serves to remind onlookers of China’s self-proclaimed benevolent intentions. Zheng He also adorns the Mombasa terminus station of the Chinese-built train line that connects Nairobi to Kenya’s main seaport, with the same message in mind. This should highlight China’s benevolence, while also embodying Adam Smith’s view that the more nations trade, the lesser their incentive to go to war. Trade, or so the adage goes, creates mutual prosperity and amicable interaction. Though whether or not Zheng He’s maritime ventures were all that peaceful is contested.
The divergence between word and image is complete in this regard, since the text does not put the commercial aspect and value of mobility between brackets. The old route was not just “a” route, but “the” Silk Road. In contrast, “The Belt and Road Initiative” does not specify the nature of goods being exchanged, though the meaning implicit in this opacity is not a mystery: it is no longer just silk that will be transported, but just about anything.
This chief change is however not dissimulated – and it reflects the power of this image that it can present itself so quietly before eyes, for its disruptive character is so well absorbed by the rhetorical strategy detailed above. This rhetoric of attenuation is thus not a mere “aesthetic” intervention. It is part of a visual technology that has a precise function: softening the clash between past and present. Though it is in the present, faced with the planetary predicament of climate crisis and environmental degradation, that a second reading of the mirrored images is due.
The broader environment in which the ships exist form a third major zone of the image: that of built as well as the natural environment –the sky, the clouds, the water on the one hand, the harbour, the quays on the other hand. The nearly invisible “natural” surroundings, which serve as the metaphorical environment of the vessel, are obscured by the neatly organized port infrastructure. Tucked away in the background, just ahead of the bows of the mirrored ships, lies the port with its cranes and stacked boxes. However insignificant this part of the image is, the more it matters in the broader political economy and political ecology within which China’s Belt and Road Initiative manifests itself.
This environment, which – by virtue of its planetary scale – exists almost entirely beyond the frame of the illustration invites a radically different approach to analysing the mirroring strategy. This is largely because, perhaps unintentionally, the image offers insight into a major challenge which ties in closely with the logistical-cum-diplomatic objectives of Xi Jinping’s China: the environmental impacts of global maritime transport.
In September 2022, Lloyd’s List, announced that China Merchant Energy Shipping, a Shanghai-based shipping company, received the newly-built New Aden, a “Very Large Crude Carrier” (or, an enormous oil tanker) from the Dalian shipyard. The New Aden follows the launch of its sister ship the New Vitality, launched four years prior, which the shipbuilder claimed to be “the first application of this novel wind power propulsion system on a Chinese commercial vessel.” China Merchant is far from the only shipping company exploring how to use direct wind propulsion to improve, avoid, and shift the source of propulsive energy from fossil to renewable.
In the context of an environment that is under immense pressure of anthropogenic climate change, the launch of these partially wind-propelled vessels is significant as the continuous expansion of maritime trade has significantly increased greenhouse gas emissions from shipping. In 2018, the International Maritime Organization – the United Nations agency tasked with regulating the shipping industry – has set a first-ever industry-wide emissions reductions strategy for international maritime cargo transport. This initial target to reduce emissions by 50% between 2008 and 2050 was significant as it marked the first genuine attempts of the IMO to act on the UNFCCC mandate to regulate emissions from shipping since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Given the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions from shipping far more quickly to ensure the sector makes a proportionate contribution to ensuring a future in which global warming is limited to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, IMO member states adopted a “revised strategy” in July 2023 which increased the level of ambition to phase out such emissions by mid-century and stand a fighting chance, however weak, to keep the 1.5 degree upper limit of warming alive. In April 2025, the Member States of the International Maritime Organization “approved” the “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) which will enshrine a fuel standard and an emissions price as an amendment to the existing MARPOL Convention. This NZF was slated for formal “adoption” in October 2025; though opposition from petrostates – including the United States – delayed adoption by 12 months.
In this context, the revival of wind-propelled cargo ships could play a significant role. Though, increasingly loud calls to curb excessive consumption alongside carbon dioxide emissions, the shipping industry remains almost entirely wedded to a growth-oriented future strategy. Even so, initial analysis indicates that the unilateral imposition of trade tariffs by the United States administration in 2025 might have a dampening effect on maritime trade volumes; thereby inadvertently lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
China’s historic sailing ship has all its junk-rigged sails set, though seems motionless. Even though the engine-powered ship doesn’t suggest any movement either, this vessel does not spew any exhaust fumes from its funnels. Absent anchors tethering the ships to the seabed and considering that the ships are too far from the quay to have any mooring lines attached, the ships are suspended in a state of disconnection from both their primary function (moving cargo) and their safe idling position (tethered in port).
Strikingly, the positioning of the sailing ship puts her with the bow in the wind. While sailing ships can “beat” up into the wind to some extent, the wind seems to blow within ten degrees of the bow. The sails are “backed”, which would push the ship astern. While this confusing depiction of sailing can be blamed on the illustrator’s lack of understanding of the physics of wind propulsion, it is telling. What does the image say about the sizable group of designers, propagandists, and other government officials who signed off on an image that, from a sailing perspective, makes no sense at all?
It would seem like the incomplete understanding of both Zheng He’s mythical voyages and person are reflected in the lost knowledge about the craft of sailing. Despite Chinese investment in 21 st century sailing ships, the depicted sailing ship is built to move ahead, through seems motionless, while her sails are set to propel it astern.
The water’s surface is flat and reflective like a mirror. This stillness of the sea underlines the motionlessness of the vessels. They would, after all, generate ripples from displacement through the displacement of their hulls through the water. Though this motionlessness allows us to spot a key difference beyond the vessels: the port that is visible in the background behind the containership is absent in the background of the bǎochuán, as if to suggest a lesser human influence on the environment at that time.
The built environment is reflected, but not in a recognizable way: the visual echoes in the water are just blots of color, they are no identifiable forms in themselves. As far as the natural environment is concerned, one can only notice that it disappears when moving from the upper to the lower part of the diptych. In either case, there is a strategy of blatant decontextualization, which the overall composition of the advertisement will use as a springboard for introducing the text: Instead of giving us something to “see” in the water, we are given something to “read”. This technique is sensible: images are more difficult to control than words, at least at the level of their reception – hence the inevitable adjunction of a verbal message that seals the lips of an image that is always in danger of speaking too loudly.
Though, far from operating in a frictionless void, any ship operates in an environment perpetually in flux. It is through ships’ abilities to generate a force of propulsion that exceeds its displacement and drag that they connect ports with seeming ease. “The globalised economy would not exist, for better or worse, without shipping, but historical accounts often present the sea as a seemingly frictionless and liminal space, where the struggles of the land are largely suspended”. That frictionless ease, indeed, is largely illusory. The ocean once was, as the documentary photographer and Allan Sekula observed, a sea of “exploit and adventure”, which successive waves of technological innovation have gradually turned into a “lake of invisible drudgery. Drudgery is however far preferable to danger and death, which were long the fate of far too many seafarers seeking “exploit and adventure.”
Though the relative safety and practicability of drudgery has come at a massive environmental cost. The shipping industry burns some three hundred million tonnes of fossil fuels a year, resulting in one billion tonnes of carbon emissions annually. The promise of peace and cooperation is not entirely innocent in a context where several centuries of rapidly accelerating innovation since the industrial revolution have led to a Faustian pact, in which marginal (as in, incremental) increases in health, comfort, and consumption in the short run come at the cost of environmental destruction in the long run.
The seemingly still surroundings conceal the tragedy that was as true of European colonialism as of global trade: while these violently extractive exchanges may not be zero-sum games – they do not occur on equitable terms either. The result is an unequal world in which we collectively overshoot planetary boundaries while leaving hundreds of millions of people to suffer in destitute poverty. The deeply entrenched inequalities remain invisible in the mirrored image, but the reality is clear. The countries that meet all minimum standards for wellbeing (“social thresholds”) far exceed the carrying capacity of Earth (“planetary boundaries”); the reverse also holds true, as the countries that remain within planetary boundaries do not meet social thresholds, even if the unnecessary excesses of the former could ensure the unmet needs of the latter are met.
The resulting tension in the environment of the depicted vessels is one that extends beyond their immediate surrounding. Though it is largely through ships that the global economy has been able to grow so rapidly and extensively since the onset of the industrial revolution. In this context, resolving the tensions between past and present requires engagement with an uncertain future.
While both figureheads look forward, which we can assume to mean the future, the ships on which they stand do not move. If anything, they are adrift, moving with the water without moving through it. Though this doesn’t explain the otherwise “old” ship’s “backed” sails that would propel her astern under the slightest winds. What, more generally, can we gauge from the strategic directions that are so conspicuously epitomised by the figureheads heading confidently into a future? More specifically, what meaning do “peace and cooperation” have in a decontextualised and depoliticised depiction of a world in which the past and the present offer a pathway to the future – which remains implicit and invisible in the image?
The future holds little in a way of an appealing horizon. The mirrored image suggests a weak choice between two inseparable options for the future. The first option is grounded in a past that glorifies the voyages of a 14th century Ming Dynasty fleet. While it signals a return to an era during which China opened itself to the world – in between long periods of closure – the bǎochuán were so-called treasure ships. These ships were not to carry the spoils of exploitation or war, but rather tribute, which consisted of reciprocal gift giving between Chinese and foreign courts. This tribute, then, served to establish a relationship of subordination, without using coercion or force. However, while relations were largely symbolic, though not entirely voluntary; contact was friendly when possible, but violent when necessary. The second option is far murkier in that the containership evokes the contemporary, which is in no way clear-cut. Though, the implied meaning of containers and suits might be a continuation of global capitalism, albeit following the logic of the Party, as a basis for engagement with the world. In combination, these approaches suggest benevolence (“peace”) and mutual interest (“cooperation”) in contrast to both European colonialism and American imperialism. Though the precise future vision, meant to be embodied by the Belt and Road Initiative, remains implicit.
At the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan, the military parade in Beijing made some of this more explicit. While some commentators refer to the group of states as the “axis of upheaval”, Xi Jinping suggested that the world is at a critical crossroads: “Today, mankind is faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum”.
The most telling contrast between the two figureheads in relation to the future may be the scope of their gaze. While Zheng He intently looks through his telescope, arguably with a very precise target in mind, the businessman reaches for the world with far greater openness. While the former deliberately looks for something detailed and specific at the exclusion of everything beyond the purview of the telescope, the latter shows little sense of direction, focus, or even intent. Though the boxes piled high behind him and the briefcase at hand suggests the primary message is that China is open for business. The direction of travel is not driven by political leadership but by the demands of the market.
The leadership on offer seems limited to diplomacy and business. Remarkably, this vision remains entirely detached from the tensions resulting from the climate, environmental, and biodiversity crises plaguing the planet. Even so, it’s increasingly clear that addressing these challenges requires an engagement not just with the quantum of trade but also the quality of trade. Indeed, the combined crises we face require a more explicit engagement with how much we trade, how we trade (and thus ship), but also – quite crucially – what we trade.
One of the authors of the article took the photo of the “Public Interest Ad” we’ve discussed in this article on their way to Shanghai in early December 2019. This was shortly after the first known case of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) on December 1 st. While the author was in Shanghai, the COVID-19 virus, as it would become known, had already started spreading, though the illness was not yet major news. It would take another month before the severity of the then-mysterious illness would become clear and it would take until March 11th before the World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus a pandemic.
At the time of writing, China had only recently opened its borders after a period of near closure of almost three years. While some have noted that China quickly used its Belt and Road Initiative logistics and diplomatic networks to swiftly expand its “Health Silk Road”, the purpose of this article is not to reflect on the pandemic nor the future of China’s place in the world. Instead, we set out to understand the ways in which China’s Belt and Road Initiative intends to create a narrative continuum between a mythical benevolent past and a mythical benevolent present (Winter 2019, 2020; Xin 2016). Our focus on the mythmaking through this “Public Interest Ad” and other means does not imply that the myths are either true or false. We treat “myths” here in a Barthesian sense, in that we focus on the semiotic significance of everyday communications by making the implicit assumptions and messages explicit.
Our question was not: What future for China’s Belt and Road Initiative in a world plagued by fire, flood, famine, plague, and war? We’ll leave the future to unravel and reveal itself. Though we do hope to have clarified the meaning and significance of the mirror image depicted.
Though what is clear from disentangling the uneven reflection of the two ships in the “Public Interest Ad” is that despite the promise of a future of benevolent and mutually beneficial relations with the world, creative historical mythmaking dominates. This brings the image full circle – through the “rear-view mirror”, we see both the past and the future in the sailing ship. Much like Perec’s repetition, the partial repetition we see in the public interest ad is deliberately similar in connecting image and mirror image, suggesting intended continuities between past and present. Perhaps quite unintentionally, that myth suggests we may soon tack to the future of wind-propelled trade; though no technology or infrastructure is inherently benevolent or in service of peace and cooperation.
By Christiaan De Beukelaer & Jan Baetens for Maritime Studies, Springer (Germany)
