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The contribution addresses the question how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been representented in the field of political economy. This discipline has highlighted two challenges for the BRI, respectively labelled as middle-income trap and Thucydides trap. The article will then show how these two challenges emerged in the Western discourse and were related to the Chinese economic growth, but also how and how quickly they were taken up by the Chinese leadership, which presented the BRI as an answer to both traps.

My contribution focuses on a photo collection dedicated to Sesto San Giovanni, a medium-sized city north of Milan that became the fifth largest industrial district in Italy after WWII. Built around the beginning of the 20th century, its heavy industries were dismantled before that century drew to its close. Closely connected to a campaign of interviews conducted by historians and social anthropologists, the images under consideration aim to relate the photographic representation of former industrial spaces in Sesto as they are today to the oral testimonies and memories gathered between 2013 and 2015. The article elaborates on several points: it briefly sketches the reasons why Sesto San Giovanni is a relevant place to study structural change and deindustrialisation; defines the nature of the visual documentation we gathered during our oral history project; describes the context where this evidence has been conceived and collected; and attempts some suggestions to understand where the fascination that emanates from these images lies, and what contemporary viewers can perceive from them as part of a large deindustrial ruin imagery, something becoming a "global genre".

Crumbling smokestacks, shuttered furnaces, and abandoned quarries are all striking representations of deindustrialization. These and other images construct a discourse whose ideological undertones, far from confining them to the realm of symbolic nostalgia, have profound effects on contemporary societies. In 2015, within the European Labor History Network (ELHN), a working group on historical cultures of labor under conditions of deindustrialization (working group) began to critically study and reflect on this nascent theme. It grew from a small group of researchers to a network of academics across Europe and beyond. Though the study of deindustrialization is not new, contemporary work offers insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of classical industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, cultural, and political tensions. Yet, existing representations of deindustrialization have been criticized as "smokestack nostalgia." In order to chart how we understand contemporary industrial decay in our political, cultural, and economic climate, the working group explores representations and more-than representations of loss and regeneration in deindustrialized regions, primarily in Europe but widening to include a growing global network.

Since the 1960s, nations across the "developed world" have been profoundly shaped by deindustrialization. In regions in which previously dominant industries faced crises or have disappeared altogether, industrial heritage offers a fascinating window into the phenomenon's cultural dimensions. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches and straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle