Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

With this pilot event we wish to provide an exchange platform for STEM researchers and scholars researching Chinese society, politics or culture (China scholars) in the Berlin-Potsdam area. The goal is to let the two groups share knowledge, experiences and ideas.

If you as a STEM researcher have questions on Chinese society, politics or culture, or wish to add China-related social sciences aspects into your work (maybe a future proposal), this is the event for you. Likewise, if you are a China scholar and wish to learn more about science in contemporary China, could imagine to support a STEM team, or maybe even design research on scientific knowledge production, come and find your partners.

We welcome all interested China scholars and STEM researchers to join this first networking event and express their hopes, uncertainties and questions. 

Time: 15:00 – 17:00, 25 September 2025 (Thursday)
Venue: Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ (RIFS), Berliner Straße 130, 14467 Potsdam
Event type: facilitated in-person event, where a brief plenary introduction will be followed by “table hopping” to allow for efficient, personal interaction
Language: English

Please, register with Agota Revesz revesz@gfz.de, who also welcomes your questions and comments.

This is the final event within the framework of the ASK („Awareness, Security and Knowledge in International Collaboration”) project of GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. 

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Agota Revesz, Projects and International Affairs, GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences
Adina Deacu, Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow of RIFS at GFZ

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The GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences is Germany's national centre for Earth system research. It is one of 18 centres belonging to the Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest research organization.

RIFS is legally and administratively part of GFZ and conducts research with the goal of understanding, advancing, and guiding processes of societal change towards sustainable development.

The Center for Cultural Studies on Science and Technology in China (CCST) at the TU Berlin offers interdisciplinary China-specific teaching and research and is also a China competence training center. 

This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

Abstract: 

China’s position within the global political order and its relationship with the liberal international order has evolved drastically in the past decades. From China’s going global, the internationalization of Chinese multinational corporations and ever-growing economic integration – globally and with the West - to the present geopolitical and geoeconomic turn. National security concerns have increasingly shaped the relations between the West and China, pivoting on the intensifying tech rivalry—now a central axis of strategic competition—in particular between the US and China. This leads us to examine the geopolitics behind Sino-Western tech decoupling, the implications for Europe and the contours of a more complex, fragmented form of reglobalization.

Bio: 

Nana de Graaff is a Professor of Global Politics and Networks at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her main research interests are within International Relations, International Political Economy and Elite Studies. De Graaff is Chair of the China in Europe Research Network (CHERN), a Europe-wide network aimed at pooling, exchanging, disseminating and generating research on Chinese socio-economic engagements with Europe. She is leading  ReGlobe at VU Amsterdam and is the principal investigator of a Vidi-financed project on The Geopolitics of Europe-China Tech Decoupling, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

In the current moment, global governance institutions face unprecedented threats. The existing literature on contestation has focused largely on disruption and crisis generated by revisionist challenges from both rising and established powers. In this project, we look at the other side of the coin and analyze the politics of global governance defense.

What kinds of actors are likely to defend institutions? And exactly how do they go about defending institutions? To address the first question, we develop a simple, two-variable framework to show which kinds of actors are likely to defend, maximize, spoil or follow in global governance institutions. We also theorize the how of institutional defense under conditions of high and low degrees of conflict among stakeholders. We then test the plausibility of these propositions through case study analysis of the international standardization of digital technologies, an arena of global governance that has emerged as central in geopolitical rivalry between the US and China. Based on multi-year qualitative fieldwork, we identify one group of “defenders” (concentrated in Europe) and two “maximizer” actor constellations (in China and the US) and illustrate European stakeholders’ evolving defense tactics in this domain of global governance.

Bio: 

Sarah Eaton is Professor of Transregional China Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and co-founder of the Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN). She is interested in the study of contemporary Chinese politics and political economy from comparative and transregional perspectives. A major focus of her current research is the politics of standardization governance, for which she has received funding from the German Research Foundation as well as the European Research Council.

For participation, please register here