Presentation short abstract

China’s “new-era marine development vision” reshapes human-ocean relations through marine restoration. Examining its practices in Southeast Asia, this article shows how China’s cosmological worldmaking intersects with technoscientific and geopolitical strategies.

Presentation long abstract

Marine restoration as a worldmaking practice has historically been shaped by Western ontologies and governance paradigms. Yet China has recently emerged as an active actor, advancing its cosmological “new-era marine development vision” (新时代海洋发展观), centered on the principles of marine ecological civilization and a shared future for a marine community. This article examines how this vision reconfigures the ontological foundations of human-ocean relations and how marine restoration serves as a site of ontological politics through which Global China is enacted. Focusing on China’s regional engagements in Southeast Asia, we argue that China’s marine worldmaking operates simultaneously as a cosmological project and a geopolitical strategy. On one hand, it opens possibilities for alternative worldmaking, where ecological restoration becomes a relational and co-constitutive process that redefines human-nature entanglements. On the other hand, it embeds technoscientific and geopolitical rationalities that extend China’s governance models and normative influence in global ocean governance. By tracing how cosmological framings intersect with technoscientific and geopolitical practices, this article contributes to debates on marine restoration as a material, cosmological, and political worldmaking process, and situates Global China as an emergent, relational, and unfinished formation oriented toward a self-proclaimed “plural” future.