Building a Community of Shared Destiny. The Belt and Road Initiative in the Political Speeches of Xi Jinping

‘Inclusive communality’ would be a contradiction in terms. Communality requires borders and borders, in turn, are essential to imposing and maintaining order. Creating a sense of communality entails, therefore, a dialectical process of “selfing and othering”. In other words, each attempt of invoking a sense of communality is based on foregrounding similarities and downplaying distinctions within a given community (We), and involves the exclusion of others (Them) by emphasizing differences. This chapter studies ideologies of borders and of communality as manifest in Xi Jinping’s speeches in order to shed light on whether the belt and road initiative implies changes in the construction of “We” and “Them”, and if so, why and how. It does so by analysing a corpus of twenty speeches by Xi Jinping held in 2013, 2015 and 2017. This selection leads to examine the discursive construction of the belt and road initiative and trace its development over the past four years. Results show that the belt and road initiative represents a new concept of globalization, in which a patchwork of socio-economic interests and philosophical ties, rather than political ideals, provides a sense of communality. By doing so, the discourse on the Belt and Road initiative works as a reaction to older discourses and, thus, continues to be informed by the logic of the We-Them juxtaposition.