Connected but Dispersed Navigating Postmodernity in the Belt and Road Spaces

Abstract

“Postmodernity” or the “postmodern condition” is described as a cultural condition when capitalism penetrates further into the cultural world. Previously outside of global capitalism, Mongolia as one of the third wave of democracies after the fall of the Soviet bloc, is now slowly entering this state of postmodernity with increased exposure and connectivity with the global capitalist system. As postmodernity in effect, societies where cultural life was previously free of capitalist incorporation now left to navigate the world of competing ideas and narratives at increased speed, saturated by information through media presentations and hyperbole. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most recent all-round project to add to an already saturated condition with its stream of information. As the BRI seeks to increase regional connectivity with China and subsequently with the rest of the world, further strengthening the global capitalist system, it welcomes another channel of various other forces further saturating and exhausting the postmodern condition. Often framed as an anti-exploitative alternative to globalization, the BRI brings competing narratives, ideas and cultural frameworks, fragmenting rather than binding together various other existing bubbles and dispersing them like atoms. Communities and localities located in the BRI sphere, though physically connected, now must navigate a very chaotic flow of information directed at them.