This article traces the process behind the implementation of the “Air Silk Road,” a cargo flight connection between Luxembourg and Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. Its origins lie in economic competition between Henan and its neighbouring provinces, dating back a decade before the official announcement of the Air Silk Road in 2017. Provincial and municipal governments in Henan displayed opportunistic risk-taking behaviour in persistently pushing for the development of Zhengzhou's airport economy, but only timing and coincidence allowed the province to gain a foothold in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). With findings drawn from fieldwork in China between 2019 and 2020, we contribute to an understanding of the implementation of the BRI, the underlying rationale and the challenges inland provinces face in integrating into the world economy.

Scholars have long grappled with the puzzle as to why some regions become peaceful and resilient while others crumble into perpetual insecurity. Much of the scholarship that they produced viewed regional formations as extensions of the state system. This work argues that state-centric tools to study regionalism have precluded us from uncovering regional forms of engagement under hierarchical relations of empires. They have privileged great power politics, at the expense of the political agency of non-state actors, such as minority communities, constitutional assemblies, and political parties, among others. This work highlights the lack of conceptual tools to capture historical continuity in the regional fabric of world politics. The bulk of the article engages in the methodology of concept development for regional fracture, in an effort to advance comparative regional studies historically and systematically. The concept development is then applied in the context of the Eastern Anatolian region of the late Ottoman Empire.

Most analyses of China's foreign and security policies treat China as a unitary actor, assuming a cohesive grand strategy articulated by Beijing. I challenge this conventional wisdom, showing how Chinese provinces can affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This contributes to existing research on the role of subnational actors in China, which has focused on how they shape domestic and economic policies. Using Hainan and Yunnan as case studies, I identify three mechanisms of provincial influence – trailblazing, carpetbagging, and resisting – and illustrate them with examples of key provincial policies. This analysis provides a more nuanced argument than is commonly found in international relations for the motivations behind evolving and increasingly activist Chinese foreign policy. It also has important policy implications for understanding and responding to Chinese behaviour, in the South China Sea and beyond.