Paper short abstract:

Drawn from China's international development initiatives, new development knowledge elements have emerged and nurtured in three dimensions of “ambiguities”: development imagination, modalities of development intervention and development geography.

Paper long abstract:

Development studies are at a crossroads. In the age that stands in need of development “convergence” and multilateralism cooperation to build collective actions in dealing with global challenges, development studies, however, impose increasing doubts and contradictions on the understanding of the traditional dichotomy between the North(centre) and the Global South(periphery). The landscape for development theories and policies has encountered fundamental transformation in terms of its ontology, epistemology and theory of practice. Against the backdrop, this paper takes China as a lens to review its mutual development initiatives for the last decade, shaping the urge for new development studies grounded in the 21st century.

This paper will first review three major waves of development ideas and theoretical debates since the 19th Century, bringing about the calling for a new paradigm of comparative development studies and global development narratives recently. Departing from this intellectual landscape, this paper will investigate China’s “mutual development” initiatives featuring the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Global Development Initiatives (GDI) to understand its creation of various forms of “ambiguity” amongst traditional development concepts and practices. We argue that both BRI and GDI provide unconventional development practices on the ground. Upon its pragmatically coevolutionary practices, three dimensions of “ambiguities” in terms of its development imagination, modalities of development intervention, as well as development geography have emerged and nurtured new development knowledge elements.