This case study examines a Chinese-Omani cooperation project in the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, Oman (SEZAD) and illustrates how its significance extends beyond the China–Gulf relationship with broader implications for trade and security in the wider region. The Sino-Oman Industrial Park is the major industrial ecosystem that is being developed within the SEZAD and is expected to attract investment of around US$10 billion. Even though the project began as one of the ports along the Maritime Silk Road, it has gained importance mainly due to being located at the strategic transshipment point for goods moving between Africa, Asia, and Europe and providing a crucial node in facilitating global trade and connectivity. This case study first discusses the overall context and considers the investment environment of Oman as well as Oman’s relationship with China. It then concentrates on the SEZAD and highlights several aspects that make this case unique. These include the involvement of multilateral funding, the involvement of Chinese provinces in the development of an overseas industrial park, and issues for China as it strategically invests in a neutral country, Oman.

The Colombo Port City Project (CPC or the “Project”) is the most prominent Chinese direct investment in Sri Lanka. The case study highlights the prospects and resilience of a BRI project in the cyclical process of democratic decay and consolidation in a host state with democratic dispensation and welfare commitments. It traces the geopolitics of the day and dynamics between the transnational discourse on human rights and investment. From a Chinese perspective, it reveals the contingencies of each BRI project and the inherent entanglement between the politics of the Chinese state and its corporations involved in the BRI with the sociopolitical realities of a host state. From a Sri Lankan perspective, this study reveals the different political and legal narratives around the Project, the challenges these generated, and the resilience of the Project. It combines a legal doctrinal approach with commentary on its political economy, focusing on the litigation and legislation concerning the CPC. Further, it offers insights into the prospects for dealing with foreign investment-related legal disputes through the public law of a host state, thereby capturing the methods by which the domestic legal sphere of a host state responds to the BRI.

The premise of this volume is that borders are shifting, and that as borders shift, rights and democratic legitimacy ought to shift with them. For good reasons, the focus of this discussion is on sovereign states and their borders. However, sovereign borders do not exhaust the types of boundaries that shape and circumscribe human freedom. In this chapter, the focus is on the private geographies that shape our lives. These private geographies – and here special economic zones are discussed – are both embedded in the sovereign states system and also help to consolidate its structure. Private geographies, which are characterized by private sources of capital and property-ownership, rely on public actors and institutions to thrive. Private economic enclaves also help funnel capital and trade rights around restrictive sovereign borders. These private geographies are of special interest because they reveal how states and capital cooperate in monopolizing land and carving up the earth, acting in ways that consolidate each other’s power. Therefore, private borders and public properties call into question the public–private divide and reveal how power over land is determined in the global age, often in ways that evade democratic control.

Offering two case studies – the economic transformations of Sohar and Duqm – this chapter grounds the book’s argument about Oman’s global labour market in material cases of spatial transformation and the integration into global value chains through which both commodities and labour circulate. The chapter argues that millennial citizen expectations take shape in these developments, from the interaction of ostensible outcomes of economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and government responsibilities of governing hydrocarbon windfalls. Citizen reactions emerge from their perceived right to, or exclusion from, these returns. The chapter further substantiates two points through these cases. First, both neoliberal reform and oil wealth explicitly or implicitly make promises to populations about an improved economic life, which, when unrealised, results in disenfranchisement and discontent. Second, capital needs labour and pursues supplies from the global labour market not only because it is cost effective but deliberately because it is both flexible and controllable. It seeks to avert potential labour disruption and secure seamless operations. Together, these findings show the ways Omani labour organises and the power of labour through the threat of its resistance.

December 1978 was a political, economic and social turning point for China. As the balance of power within the top leadership shifted, a search for new policies began that deepened into what came to be called “reform and opening” and culminated decades later in a multistranded transition to a market-based economy. This new policy orientation was accompanied by a shift in development strategy that permitted China to take advantage of its factor endowments and structural conditions and dramatically accelerate economic growth. Thus 1978 marks not only the beginning of “reform,” but also the start of the Chinese “economic miracle,” a remarkable thirty-two-year period, through 2010, during which GDP grew at an annual rate of 10 percent. Chinese economic structure and Chinese society were utterly transformed. An extraordinary distance separates the vibrant upper-middle-income, predominantly market-based, economy that is China today from the troubled, isolated low-income country that was China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. This chapter builds its narrative around the systemic and structural changes that transformed China, especially in the thirty years between 1978 and 2008.