Introduction

In the 2010s, international media hailed the Polish city of Lodz (Polish: Łódź) as a symbol of China's Belt and Road Initiative (e.g. Shepard, 2016 ; Tiezzi, 2016 ). Since April 2013, freight trains from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, have been arriving daily, their containers stacked with electronics, textiles, and machinery after a two-week journey across Eurasia. For a brief moment, Lodz, a post-industrial city of 653,000 inhabitants in central Poland, appeared on the global map as Europe's new Silk Road hub ( Kamiński, 2019 ). Local officials spoke of an “economic renaissance”, business leaders looked for opportunities in Chinese markets, and university experts offered their knowledge to support the city's international leap. For a secondary city still struggling with the legacy of industrial decline, the new railway link promised visibility and a place in the global economy ( Bartosiewicz & Szterlik, 2019 ).